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Garlic
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Why are charm quarks (+2/3e) heavier than strange quarks (-1/3 e) while up quarks (+2/3e) are lighter than down quarks (-1/3e)?
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mfb said:No one knows. In the standard model, the quark masses are free parameters.
-1/3, not -1/2, but I guess that is a typo.
ChrisVer said:because the charm quark's mass was predicted as such to avoid having flavor changing neutral currents beyond what was actually found experimentally
Anchovy said:Are there no GUTs where a reason for this emerges? Like the ratios of fermion masses that sometimes pop out?
Also some personal thought on this. You could also expect that the exotic yukawas [itex]Y_t=1[/itex],[itex]Y_u=0[/itex] happen due to the mechanism that breaks the GUT, and not in the GUT representations themselves. So perhaps at GUT level all quarks are massless, and then they get some simple yukawa/CKM matrix but the up and top are heavily corrected. Or perhaps it is a two-steps process, where first the top gets the "natural" yukawa value (so all the others should be protected by an unknown symmetry) and then this value forces masses to go between zero and 1. This second approach, still, does not explain why the candidate for zero mass is the "up" instead of the "down quark".Anchovy said:Are there no GUTs...
The top mass had a reasonable prediction from precision measurements (early predictions were off, but shortly before the discovery they got better), but that is still a prediction based on experimental results related to the top.ChrisVer said:one fun note, of course it's not a reason but ok:
because the charm quark's mass was predicted as such to avoid having flavor changing neutral currents beyond what was actually found experimentally, as for example in the [itex]K^0 \rightarrow \mu^+ \mu^-[/itex].
mfb said:@arivero: Please don't forget our rules about personal speculations
eltodesukane said:"Why is c quark heavier than s while u is heavier than d?"
-- u is not heavier than d
mass u = 2.3 MeV/c^2
mass d = 4.8 MeV/c^2
Z decays: If there is a 4th generation, the neutrino would need a mass above 45 GeV, otherwise the Z would have more invisible decays. As the other neutrinos are lighter than ~0.1 eV, that would be a really huge mass jump.eltodesukane said:(I read somewhere that a 4th generation was not possible for some cosmological reason related to the Big Bang, but I wonder how definitive that conclusion is.)
eltodesukane said:In any case, the mass pattern is puzzling, and it is begging for an explanation.
Just look at the huge mass jump from u to c to t.
And if there is a 4th generation, how heavy would be the one after t?
(I read somewhere that a 4th generation was not possible for some cosmological reason related to the Big Bang, but I wonder how definitive that conclusion is.)
That's a specific model they exclude.Garlic said:It also says "According to the results of the statistical analysis by researchers from CERN, and Humboldt University of Berlin, the existence of further fermions can be excluded with a probability of 99.99999% (5.3 sigma)"
Garlic said:Huge mass differences between different generations doesn't seem that abnormal, I think..
On other hand, I really would like to hear your opinions -and the ideas of other physicists of the group- about this question. Not an answer, as we already agree there is none, but which is your hunch about this inversion: a still unseen quantum number? Some GUT thing? Pure randomness of yukawa couplings? Differente perturbative effects in the +1/2 or -1/2 sector of isospin? I find hard to believe that people has never stopped to think this kind of things, even if they are not its main field of research.mfb said:about personal speculations.
We don't know. They could have a hierarchy similar to the quark masses.ChrisVer said:the neutrinos are very close to each other compared to the rest of particles
mfb said:We don't know. They could have a hierarchy similar to the quark masses.
The ratio between the heaviest and the intermediate neutrino mass eigenstate is at most ~6, but the lightest one does not have a lower limit.
vanhees71 said:There's no clue,
eltodesukane said:And if there is a 4th generation, how heavy would be the one after t?
Vanadium 50 said:There is no (sequential) 4th generation. A 4th generation will increase the Higgs cross-section by almost an order of magnitude.
I very much doubt there is any more physics in the Koide formula than there is in the Titus-Bode formula.
ChrisVer said:Is there any reason to bring forth a 4th generation rather than a single heavy fermion?
ohwilleke said:There is almost surely some deeper reason for this.
Vanadium 50 said:You could have said the exact same thing about the Titus-Bode law in 1775.
nikkkom said:Koide rule's is less than 0.01%
Vanadium 50 said:There is no (sequential) 4th generation. A 4th generation will increase the Higgs cross-section by almost an order of magnitude.