Rishon model


The Harari–Shupe preon model is the earliest effort to develop a preon model to explain the phenomena appearing in the Standard Model of particle physics. It was first developed independently by Haim Harari and by Michael A. Shupe and later expanded by Harari and his then-student Nathan Seiberg.

The model

The model has two kinds of fundamental particles called rishons. They are T and V. All leptons and all flavours of quarks are three-rishon ordered triplets. These groups of three rishons have spin-½. They are as follows:
Each rishon has a corresponding antiparticle. Hence:
The W+ boson = TTTVVV;
The W− boson =.
Baryon number and lepton number are not conserved, but the quantity B−L is conserved. A baryon number violating process in the model would be
which would appear in a particle detector as
Note that:
In the expanded Harari–Seiberg version the rishons possess color and hypercolor, explaining why the only composites are the observed quarks and leptons. Under certain assumptions, it is possible to show that the model allows exactly for three generations of quarks and leptons.

Evidence

Currently, there is no scientific evidence for the existence of substructure within quarks and leptons, but there is no profound reason why such a substructure may not be revealed at shorter distances. In 2008, Piotr Zenczykowski has derived the RM by starting from a non-relativistic O phase space. Such model is based on fundamental principles and the structure of Clifford algebras, and fully recovers the RM by naturally explaining several obscure and otherwise artificial features of the original model.

In popular culture