What is the mass density distribution of an electron?

Let me start by saying nothing is known about any possible substructure of the electron. There have been many experiments done to try to determine this, and so far all results are consistent with the electron being a point particle. The best reference I can find is this 1988 paper by Hans Dehmelt (which I unfortunately can't access right now) which sets an upper bound on the radius of $10^{-22}\text{ m}$.

The canonical reference for this sort of thing is the Particle Data Group's list of searches for lepton and quark compositeness. What they actually list in that reference is not exactly a bound on the electron's size in any sense, but rather the bounds on the energy scales at which it might be possible to detect any substructure that may exist within the electron. Currently, the minimum is on the order of $10\text{ TeV}$, which means that for any process occurring up to roughly that energy scale (i.e. everything on Earth except high-energy cosmic rays), an electron is effectively a point. This corresponds to a length scale on the order of $10^{-20}\text{ m}$, so it's not as strong a bound as the Dehmelt result.

Now, most physicists (who care about such things) probably suspect that the electron can't really be a point particle, precisely because of this problem with infinite mass density and the analogous problem with infinite charge density. For example, if we take our current theories at face value and assume that general relativity extends down to microscopic scales, an point-particle electron would actually be a black hole with a radius of $10^{-57}\text{ m}$. However, as the Wikipedia article explains, the electron's charge is larger than the theoretical allowed maximum charge of a black hole of that mass. This would mean that either the electron would be a very exotic naked singularity (which would be theoretically problematic), or general relativity has to break at some point before you get down to that scale. It's commonly believed that the latter is true, which is why so many people are occupied by searching for a quantum theory of gravity.

However, as I've mentioned, we do know that whatever spatial extent the electron may have cannot be larger than $10^{-22}\text{ m}$, and we're still two orders of magnitude away from probing that with the most powerful particle accelerator in the world. So for at least the foreseeable future, the electron will effectively be a point.


David Zaslavsky has given a solid, relatively model-independent explanation of the empirical bounds on the size of an electron based on particle-physics experiments that probe short distance scales by using collisions at short wavelengths. There is also another way of getting at this question, which has been studied by people who have tried to model quarks and leptons as composites of more fundamental particles called preons. If the preons are confined to a space of linear size $x$, then the uncertainty principle says their mass-energy is at least about $\hbar/x $. But given even a relatively weak bound on $x$, this makes the mass-energy of the preons greater than the mass of the electron they supposedly make up. This is called the confinement problem. Various people (e.g., 't Hooft 1979) have worked out various possible ways to get around the confinement problem, but essentially the confinement problem makes these ideas unlikely to work out.