Eightfold Way for Composite Quarks and Leptons

TL;DR

This paper proposes a composite model for quarks and leptons based on an eightfold symmetry of preons, leading to a natural emergence of the standard model and GUT structures through anomaly matching and symmetry breaking.

Contribution

It introduces an eight-preon model with $SU(8)$ symmetry that explains quark and lepton families as composite states, connecting preon dynamics to GUT and family symmetries.

Findings

Preons with $SU(8)$ symmetry can form composite quarks and leptons.

Anomaly matching constrains the number of preons to eight.

Symmetry breaking reduces $SU(8)$ to $SU(5)$ with family symmetry.

Abstract

It is now almost clear that there is no meaningful internal symmetry higher than the one family GUTs like as $SU(5)$, $SO(10)$, or $E(6)$ for classification of all observed quarks and leptons. Any attempt to describe all three quark-lepton families in the GUT framework leads to higher symmetries with enormously extended representations which contain lots of exotic states as well that never been detected in an experiment. This may motivate us to continue seeking a solution in some subparticle or preon models for quark and leptons just like as in the nineteen-sixties the spectroscopy of hadrons had required to seek a solution in the quark model for hadrons. At that time, there was very popular some concept invoked by Murray Gell-Mann and called the Eightfold Way according to which all low-lying baryons and mesons are grouped into octets. We now find that this concept looks much more adequate when it is applied to elementary preons and composite quarks and leptons. Remarkably, just the eight left-handed and right-handed preons and their generic metaflavor symmetry $SU(8)$ may determine the fundamental constituens of material world. This result for an admissible number of preons, $N=8$, appears as a solution to the 't Hooft's anomaly matching condition provided that (1) this condition is satisfied separately for the $L$-preon and $R$-preon composites and (2) these composites fill only one multiplet of some $SU(N)$ symmetry group rather than a set of its multiplets. We next show that a partial $L$-$R$ symmetry breaking reduces an initially emerged vectorlike $SU(8)$ theory down to the conventional $SU(5)$ GUT with an extra local family symmetry $SU(3)_{F}$ and three standard generations of quarks and leptons.