Your most favorite subatomic particle

[bluemoon]

Talk about particle-wave duality, one of my favor experiment is the double slit, which extended to cover all normal matter - ie. even a proton can pass thru' two slit simultaneously, and interfere with itself

[xenos]

One is the consequence of other. On interactions photon will loose it's energy transferring it to other particles while it disappears at all.

Actually Z bosons can do that as well. Plus, unlike photons, Z bosons can even be absorbed by neutrinos and completely disappear.

I didn't say that it is the only such particle. Also, Higgs bosons and gravitons are still hypotetical and Z boson is heavy and has very short lifetime.

So maybe you should add "It is stable." to your list?

I meant Schrödinger equation and the historical role of photon in quantum physics. Of course, complex numbers are widely used at present in describing the propagation of waves.

Well, any particle satisfies the Schrödinger equation.

Z boson is the only other particle found experimentally, but, AFAIK, not in annihilation reaction. So, only photon annihilation is proven in practice.

The famous LEP experiment at CERN produced lots of Z bosons by annihilation of electrons and positrons and measured their properties very accurately.

I never heard about similar experiments with other particles. It seems that unlike photons that experiments are too complicated to conduct them in practice.

It depends on what you mean by "in practise". Certainly these experiments are too complicate to conduct them in a college lab. You need a particle accelerator and a huge detector. However, there are your a number of "b-quark factories" around the world where these experiments can be (and actually are) conducted.

[Yoda]

So maybe you should add "It is stable." to your list?

Oh, no, not needed, - there are many stable particles

Well, any particle satisfies the Schrödinger equation.

Of course. But the history of quantum mechanics starts mainly from photoelectric effect. So this is also just a historical role of photon.

The famous LEP experiment at CERN produced lots of Z bosons by annihilation of electrons and positrons and measured their properties very accurately.

OK, accepted.

It depends on what you mean by "in practise". Certainly these experiments are too complicate to conduct them in a college lab. You need a particle accelerator and a huge detector. However, there are your a number of "b-quark factories" around the world where these experiments can be (and actually are) conducted.

"In practice" I certainly meant on accelerator, not in college lab. In theory, of course any entangled particles will demonstrate the break of locality principle...
I digged it more... yes, experiments were also conducted with electrons, atoms of Rubidium and Bose-Einstein condensate. But first, still most precise and evident experiments were conducted on photons.

[xenos]

Of course. But the history of quantum mechanics starts mainly from photoelectric effect. So this is also just a historical role of photon.

Actually it started even a bit earlier. In 1900, Max Planck explained the spectrum of a black body by assuming that light is not absorbed and emitted continuously, but only in fixed portions, or "quanta". In 1905 Albert Einstein explained the photoelectric effect by the same assumption.

But anyway, you are right - the electromagnetic field was the first that was described by a quantum theory, so in this sense the photon was the first quantum particle.