How many quantum fields are there? I'm just an aficionado, but my understanding is that in QFT, the photon is an excitation of the electromagnetic field, the electron is an excitation of the electron field, and so on. Is there a quantum field for each elementary particle, and if so, how many?
 A: The Standard Model of particle physics is the current well stablished theory for elementary particles. In it, fields are grouped together using symmetries (Lorentz and gauge) in what are called multiplets. Because of it, it is not clear how to count the number of quantum fields there are in it.
For example, we can count for each multiplet how many real degrees of freedom it has. The counting goes as follows (don't worry if you don't understand some of the words, they're just ways of stating how the symmetries act on the multiplet):


*

*Complex scalars:


*

*Higgs doublet: $SU(2)$ doublet, $4$ d.o.f.


*Two-component spinors:


*

*Right-handed electron ($3$ flavors): singlet, $4$ d.o.f.

*Right-handed up quarks ($3$ flavors): color-triplet, $12$ d.o.f.

*Right-handed down quarks ($3$ flavors): color-triplet, $12$ d.o.f.

*Left-handed lepton doublet ($3$ flavors): $SU(2)$-doublet, $8$ d.o.f.

*Left-handed quark doublet ($3$ flavors): color-triplet $SU(2)$-doublet, $36$ d.o.f.


*Massless complex vectors:


*

*$U(1)_Y$ gauge boson: singlet, $4$ d.o.f.

*$SU(2)$ gauge boson: $SU(2)$-triplet, $12$ d.o.f.

*Gluon: color-octet, $32$ d.o.f.



So there are $19$ multiplets and if we decompose them we get $268$ real fields.

Now, in the Standard Model there is something called spontaneous symmetry breaking. It makes massive the massless fields it contained in principle. This changes the counting and gives us the fields associated with the particles we are more familiar with:


*

*The Higgs boson

*3 charged leptons: electron, muon and tau.

*3 neutral leptons: the neutrinos corresponding to electron, muon and tau.

*6 quarks (3 colors each): up, down, charm, strange, bottom and top.

*The photon

*3 electroweak massive bosons: $Z$ and $W^\pm$

*8 gluons


Counting this way gives us 37 fields. As you can see, field counting can be very arbitrary as it depends on what you understand by a single quantum field
