Quarkways to particle symmetry

FEB 01, 1966

Each time physicists think they’ve found the fundamental building blocks of matter, they discover that the blocks themselves have a structure. Now it seems that the blocks may be quarks—with three different kinds you can build all known mesons and baryons and fit them into symmetrical arrangements of 8 or 10 particles.

DOI: 10.1063/1.3048050

Laurie M. Brown

WHEN THE EDITORS OF PHYSICS TODAY asked me—or, better, challenged me—to write an article explaining unitary particle symmetries to physicists who are not fundamental‐particle specialists, I hesitated. But on considering the physicist whose children may ask, “Daddy, what are fundamental particles made of?”, I decided to write the article after all. That question—so innocent, so clear, so full of healthy curiosity—deserves to be answered, as far as possible, on the same level.

This article is only available in PDF format

More about the authors

Laurie M. Brown, Northwestern University.