Introduction
As known, matter at the fundamental level consists of quarks and leptons. Quarks combine to form hadrons, mostly baryons and mesons via the strong force and are presumed to still well confined. Among the baryons are the proton (the positive electrical charge) and neutrons (with zero electric charge) that they combine to form atomic nuclei of all chemical elements of the periodic table. Normally, a cloud of electrons (negative electric charge and exactly opposite to that of the proton) surrounds these cores. The assembly formed by a core and a cloud, which comprises negative electrons and positive protons, is an atom. Atoms can be arranged together to form larger and more complex structures such as molecules (Mirsayar et al., 2017).
Chemistry is the science that describes how nuclei and electrons are combined to form various elements and molecules.
In a more cosmological vision matter and antimatter are considered. Each sub-particle of an atom may be counterbalanced with an (anti-) antimatter pair (e.g., electron-positron). An antimatter particle differs from its partner by the fact that all its various “fillers” (electric charge, spin, color charge, etc.) are opposite. However, such particles have the same mass.
Although the fundamental laws of physics do not indicate a preference for matter over antimatter, cosmological observations indicate that the universe consists almost entirely of matter.
The material can be found in several states or phases. The four most known states are solid, liquid, gas and plasma. There are also other a little more exotic states such as liquid crystal, Bose-Einstein, super-fluid and supercritical fluid (Bose-Einstein, Wikipedia). When the material passes from one state to another, it performs a phase transition. This phenomenon (which is associated to changes in physical parameters: Pressure, temperature, volume, density, energy, etc.) is studied in thermodynamic via the phase diagrams.