Tuesday, September 13, 2011

Jiao-Lin Xu Asks The Right Questions

Jiao-Lin Xu, a physicist at the University of Georgia in Athens, Georgia (in the United States), is doing some great work asking and answering the big question of how to determine the masses and quantum numbers of the quarks and hadrons of the Standard Model with phenomenological formulas that seek to illuminate the deeper workings of the Standard Model and reduce the number of arbitrary constants in it. His most recent paper on arxiv from 2008, is entitled, "The New Symmetries Beyond the Standard Model (The Body-centred Cubic Periodic Symmetries in Particle Physics)" and provides simple formulas to calculate all quark and hadron masses to an accuracy of about 2%, similar to what QCD has achieved from first principles in the case of the proton and neutron. Another recent paper from Xu, from 2006, is "Using Phenomenological Formulae, Deducing the Masses and Flavors of the Quarks, Baryons and Mesons from Two Elementary Quarks". His work is in the same league of Koide's who phenomenological formula predicted the tau mass.

Another, less ambitious, published take on the same questions is found in E.F. Suisso; J.P.B.C. de Melo; T. Frederico, Ground state masses and binding energies of the nucleon, hyperon and heavy baryons in a light-front model (Braz. J. Phys. vol.33 no.2 São Paulo June 2003) http://dx.doi.org/10.1590/S0103-97332003000200028.

Amateur physicist Eliyahu Comay's blog "What's inside the proton?", also deserves credit for asking the right questions, although I lack the competence to evaluate his somewhat non-canonical approaches to answering those questions.

Are variety of background articles on QCD can be found here.

Good work along the same lines for the leptons is being done by scholars such as Ahmed Rashed, Alakabha Datta in "The charged lepton mass matrix and non-zero θ13 with TeV scale New Physics."

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