Narrow Results

Shortly after his escape, in 1968, from the DDR to the Western world, Harald Fritzsch made a fast career in physics while investigating the strong force in elementary particles. Inspired by Gell-Mann, Yang and Mills and many others, he contributed to the rise of the Standard Model, and in particular the developments of theories for the color confinement mechanism.

The quark shell model has been successful in describing properties of hadrons. Because of color the quark shell model with 3n valence quarks has many more states which are singlet in color than the nuclear shell model with n valence nucleons. However, the quark interaction has been shown to favor two quarks coupled to spin zero and isospin zero and color , called diquarks. We show that the color singlet states in the quark shell model which have the maximal number of diquarks consistent with the Pauli symmetry are in one to one correspondence with the states of the nuclear shell model. We also investigate the implications of the quark interactions on the nuclear shell model interaction.

The US Nuclear Science Advisory Committee (NSAC) recently recommended the construction of a high-luminosity, high-energy Electron Ion Collider (EIC), with polarized beams capable of colliding polarized electrons with polarized proton and light ion beams, and with any nucleus. The $\sqrt{s}$ range between 40 GeV and 140 GeV, and luminosity range from 10³³⁻³⁴ cm⁻² s⁻¹ were recommended. It is anticipated that under the current guidance from the DOE, the collider could become operational in the second half of the 2020’s. This paper summarizes its science and the scope of this over all project.

The fermionic properties of quarks and leptons are determined by their weak interactions, the ultimate sources of which are their nonzero weak charges, and they are distinguished from each other by the strong interaction, which applies to quarks but not to leptons. There is no obvious reason why electric charge should be relevant to the distinction, but quarks are all required, in the conventional picture, to have electric charges, while leptons are not. It is as though the strong interaction requires electric charge to be present even though it is defined to be electric charge independent. It is proposed that the solution of this mystery lies in subtle aspects of the SU(3) × SU(2) × U(1) symmetry breaking of the three interactions and is a consequence of the way in which this symmetry breaking arises.

Murray Gell-Mann is one of the most outstanding scientists of the last century. At this conference on the occasion of his 80th birthday, the important scientific achievements of Gell-Mann will be discussed. I shall describe in particular his contributions to particle physics.

Murray's father Arthur Gell-Mann grew up in Czernowitz, a city once belongs to the Austrian empire. Today, Czernowitz belongs to the Ukraine. Arthur Gell-Mann studied in Vienna and came to the United States in 1911. He lived and worked in New York, where he became the owner of a language school and married Pauline Reichstein…

Life at Caltech with Murray Gell-Mann in the early 1960's is remembered. Our different paths to quarks, leading to different views of their reality, are described.

The exciting findings and activities in particle physics in the 50's and 60's will be discussed from an experimentalist's viewpoint. Particular emphasis will be placed on the description of several crucial discoveries (including the omega minus) and on the remarkable insight, guidance, and major contributions of Murray Gell-Mann to the understanding of the symmetry of hadrons which led to the development of the standard model of the strong interactions.

Early work on the compositeness of hadrons is reviewed, with emphasis on Quarks and Confinement.

I give a brief review of advances in the strong interaction theory. This talk was delivered at the Conference in honor of Murray Gell-Mann's 80th birthday, 24-26 February 2010, Singapore.

Pauli’s principle is generalized for the case of the Z₃ grading replacing the usual Z₂ grading, leading to ternary commutation relations and ternary algebras. Invariant cubic forms on such algebras are introduced, with the SL(2,C) arising naturally as their invariance group in the case of lowest dimension, with two generators only. The wave equation generalizing the Dirac operator for the Z₃-graded case is introduced, whose diagonalization leads to a third-order equation. The solutions of this equation cannot propagate because their exponents contain a non-oscillating real damping factor. We show how certain cubic products can propagate nevertheless. The model suggests the origin of the color SU(3) symmetry.

We briefly review the recent studies of the behavior of composite systems in magnetic field. The hydrogen atom is chosen to demonstrate the new results which may be experimentally tested. Possible applications to physics of antihydrogen are mentioned.

A brief account of interesting moments in the genesis of the quark paradigm is presented.