I’m Dr. David Lawrence. I’m a physicist at Jefferson Lab.
And I’m going to describe what an electron is.
An electron is a very tiny particle. It’s a fundamental part of the atom.  
The atom has electrons that are around the outside 
and they carry the negative charge of the atom,
and they surround the nucleus, 
which is on the very center of the atom and carries the positive charge.  
Electrons are very, very small, 
in fact they’re so small we haven’t been able to measure it 
We just assume that they are point-like particles.
Electrons belong to a family of particles called leptons, 
along with muons and tauons and neutrinos.
Electrons are also particles that are very useful 
when we’re trying to do experiments to study nuclear physics, 
like we do at Jefferson Lab here,
because we will accelerate the electrons in the accelerator 
to give them very high energy 
to help us probe the inner workings of the nucleus 
and try to understand the workings of the strong force.
