preon in nLab

Contents

Idea

While in the standard model of particle physics all hadrons and mesons are bound states of quarks, the quarks themselves, together with the leptons, are assumed to be “elementary” particles, hence not themselves bound states of other particles.

While this does fit very well with current experimental observation, one may speculate if at a higher energy scale quarks and/or leptons are themselves bound states of more fundamental particles. These hypothetical more fundamental particles are then generically called preons.

References

Textbook account:

• Robert E. Marshak, Chapter 9 of: Conceptual Foundations of Modern Particle Physics, World Scientific 1993 (doi:10.1142/1767)

See also:

• Wikipedia, Preon

A proposal for an embedding of preon models into string theory is in

• Noriaki Kitazawa, Dynamical Generation of Yukawa Couplings in Intersecting D-brane Models, JHEP 0411 (2004) 044 (arXiv:hep-th/0409146)