The Harari–Shupe preon model (also known as rishon model, RM) is the earliest effort to develop a preon model to explain the phenomena appearing in the Standard Model (SM) of particle physics.[1] It was first developed independently by Haim Harari and by Michael A. Shupe[2] and later expanded by Harari and his then-student Nathan Seiberg.
The model has two kinds of fundamental particles called rishons (ראשון, rishon means "first" in Hebrew). They are T ("Third" since it has an electric charge of + e, or Tohu and V ("Vanishes", since it is electrically neutral, or Vohu. The terms tohu and vohu are picked from the Biblical phrase Tohu va-Vohu, for which the King James Version translation is "without form, and void". All leptons and all flavours of quarks are three-rishon ordered triplets. These groups of three rishons have spin-. They are as follows:
Each rishon has a corresponding antiparticle. Hence:
The W+ boson = TTTVVV;The W- boson = .
Note that:
Baryon number and lepton number are not conserved, but the quantity is conserved. A baryon number violating process (such as proton decay) in the model would be
In the expanded Harari–Seiberg version the rishons possess color and hypercolor, explaining why the only composites are the observed quarks and leptons.[3] Under certain assumptions, it is possible to show that the model allows exactly for three generations of quarks and leptons.
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 (Żenczykowski) has derived the RM by starting from a non-relativistic O(6) phase space.[4] 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.