Physics is also called "high-energy physics" because many elementary particles do not occur naturally but are created only during high-energy collisions of other particles. Currently, the interactions of elementary particles and fields are described by the Standard Model. The model accounts for the 12 known particles of matter (quarks and leptons) that interact via the strong, weak, and electromagnetic fundamental forces. Dynamics are described in terms of matter particles exchanging gauge bosons (gluons, W and Z bosons, and photons, respectively). The Standard Model also predicts a particle known as the Higgs boson. In July 2012 CERN, the European laboratory for particle
Elementary particle general relativity. There may be hypothetical elementary particles not described by the Standard Model, such as the graviton, the particle that would carry the gravitational force, and sparticles, supersymmetric partners of the ordinary particles. The 12 fundamental fermions are divided into 3 generations of 4 particles each. Half of the fermions are leptons, three of which have an electric charge of −1, called the electron (), the muon (), and the tau (), the other three leptons are neutrinos (, , ), which are the only elementary fermions with no electric or color charge. The remaining six particles are quarks