Thursday, 23 August, 2001 11:00 am 

Le Couteur Building Seminar Room

Dr Brian Robson

Department of Theoretical Physics

A New Classification of the Fundamental Particles

ABSTRACT: While the Standard Model (SM) of particle physics has enjoyed
considerable success in describing the interactions of leptons and the multitude of hadrons (baryons and mesons) with each other, as well as the decay modes of the
unstable leptons and hadrons, the model suffers from having a large number of additive
quantum numbers, some of which are not strictly conserved in weak interactions.
In the seminar I shall describe a new classification scheme which is based upon
the use of only three additive quantum numbers: charge (Q), particle number (p)
which essentially replaces electron number (L ) and baryon number (B), and a
generation quantum number (g) which essentially replaces the remaining additive
quantum numbers of the SM: muon lepton number (L ) , tau lepton number (L ) ,
strangeness (S), charm (C), bottomness ( ) and topness (T). These three quantum
numbers are strictly conserved in strong, electromagnetic and weak interactions.
The seminar will be non-technical and historical in approach.