Subatomic particle is the total number of nucleons (neutrons and protons collectively). Chemistry concerns itself with how electron sharing binds atoms into structures such as crystals and molecules. Nuclear physics deals with how protons and neutrons arrange themselves in nuclei. The study of subatomic particles, atoms and molecules, and their structure and interactions, requires quantum mechanics. Analyzing processes that change the numbers and types of particles requires quantum field theory. The study of subatomic particles "per se" is called particle physics. The term "high-energy physics" is nearly synonymous to "particle physics" since creation of particles requires high energies: it occurs only as
Discovery of the neutron also measured how the new radiation impacted the atoms of various gases. He found that the new radiation consisted of not gamma rays, but uncharged particles with about the same mass as the proton. These particles were neutrons. Chadwick won the Nobel Prize in Physics for this discovery in 1935. The year 1932 was later referred to as the "annus mirabilis" for nuclear physics in the Cavendish Laboratory, with discoveries of the neutron, artificial nuclear disintegration by the Cockcroft–Walton particle accelerator, and the positron. Given the problems of the "proton–electron model", it was quickly accepted that the atomic nucleus is