Timeline of particle physics

19th century

• 1815 – William Prout hypothesizes that all matter is built up from hydrogen, adumbrating the proton;
• 1838 – Richard Laming hypothesized a subatomic particle carrying electric charge;
• 1858 – Julius Plücker produced cathode rays;
• 1874 – George Johnstone Stoney hypothesizes a minimum unit of electric charge. In 1891, he coins the word electron for it;
• 1886 – Eugene Goldstein produced anode rays;
• 1897 – J. J. Thomson discovered the electron;
• 1899 – Ernest Rutherford discovered the alpha and beta particles emitted by uranium;
• 1900 – Paul Villard discovered the gamma ray in uranium decay.

  20th century

• 1905 – Albert Einstein hypothesized the photon to explain the photoelectric effect.
• 1911 – Hans Geiger, Ernest Marsden and Ernest Rutherford discovered the nucleus of an atom;
• 1919 – Ernest Rutherford discovered the proton;
• 1928 – Paul Dirac postulated the existence of positrons as a consequence of the Dirac equation;
• 1930 – Wolfgang Pauli postulated the neutrino to explain the energy spectrum of beta decays;
• 1932 – James Chadwick discovered the neutron;
• 1932 – Carl D. Anderson discovered the positron;
• 1935 – Hideki Yukawa predicted the existence of mesons as the carrier particles of the strong nuclear force;
• 1936 – Carl D. Anderson discovered the muon while he studied cosmic radiation;
• 1947 – George Dixon Rochester and Clifford Charles Butler discovered the kaon, the first strange particle;
• 1947 – Cecil Powell, César Lattes and Giuseppe Occhialini discovered the pion;
• 1955 – Owen Chamberlain, Emilio Segrè, Clyde Wiegand, and Thomas Ypsilantis discovered the antiproton;
• 1956 – Clyde Cowan and Frederick Reines discovered the neutrino;
• 1957 – Bruno Pontecorvo postulated the flavor oscillation;
• 1962 – Leon M. Lederman, Melvin Schwartz and Jack Steinberger discovered the muon neutrino;
• 1967 – Bruno Pontecorvo postulated neutrino oscillation;
• 1974 – Burton Richter and Samuel Ting discovered the J/ψ particle composed of charm quarks;
• 1977 – Upsilon particle discovered at Fermilab, demonstrating the existence of the bottom quark;
• 1977 – Martin Lewis Perl discovered the tau lepton after a series of experiments;
• 1979 – Gluon observed indirectly in three-jet events at DESY;
• 1983 – Carlo Rubbia and Simon van der Meer discovered the W and Z bosons;
• 1995 – Top quark discovered at Fermilab;
• 2000 – Tau neutrino proved distinct from other neutrinos at Fermilab;
• 2000 – CERN announced quark-gluon plasma, a new phase of matter.

  21st century

• 2012 – Higgs boson-like particle discovered at CERN's Large Hadron Collider.