Fractional Electric Charge Research Articles

Fractionary charged particles confronting lepton flavor violation and the muon’s anomalous magnetic moment

In light of the recent result published by the Fermilab Muon [Formula: see text] experiment, we investigate a simple model that includes particles of fractional electric charges: a color-singlet fermion and a scalar with charges [Formula: see text] and [Formula: see text], respectively. The impact of these particles on the muon anomalous magnetic moment is examined, particularly the restrictions on their Yukawa couplings with the light leptons. Given that lepton flavor violation processes impose stringent constraints on certain scenarios beyond the Standard Model, we evaluate the one-loop contribution of the new particles to [Formula: see text] in order to identify regions in the parameter space consistent with the Fermilab results and compatible with the current and projected limits on the branching ratio [Formula: see text]. Taking into account the current lower bound for the masses of fractionary charged particles, which is around 634[Formula: see text]GeV, we show that the mass of the scalar particle with fractional charge must exceed 1[Formula: see text]TeV. In particular, we present some estimatives for double production of the color-singlet fermion at the 14[Formula: see text]TeV LHC. Finally, we also study the validity of our model in light of the QCD lattice results on the muon [Formula: see text].

Fractional and Unitary Electric Charges I: Classical Foundations of Quantum Effects

Numerical value of the atom’s electrical/electromotive charge emerges naturally upon expressing its definitive e-m oscillation frequency ν as an exponent of eight, 8ν  (‘octave quantum’). This simple procedure realizes, for each element, accurate values of the established quantum numbers. It is revealed that unlike others, the spin quantum number ±½ is not an ‘octave quantum’, it actually turns out an exponent of a field coupling that manifests atomic mass. Octave quanta of frequencies of atoms of the second and third (invisible unknown) elements of nature’s chemical periodicity, “blackton” Bl and “boston” Bs, (8⅓, 8⅔)  manifest observational fractional one-third 1/3  and two-third 2/3  electrical charges normally associated with ‘quarks’. Based on the concept of ‘octave quantum’ the author uses periodic arrangement of the chemical elements to present a unique account of established quantum numbers, it facilitates a deeper insight into factors responsible for unusual valences commonly encountered among transition elements. It is concluded that the ease with which the procedure reproduces established quantum numbers strongly suggests an intrinsic classical origin of observational quantum characteristics.

“Three Quarks for Muster Mark!” A Slavic gloss to Joyce’s 'Finnegans Wake'

The unclear verse “Three Quarks for Muster Mark!”, introduced by James Joyce (1882–1941) to his novel entitled Finnegans Wake (first published in 1939), was a literary source for the English word quark denoting ‘an elementary particle with a fractional electric charge that is part of a proton, neutron or other interacting elementary particle’. The American physicist Murray Gell-Mann, winner of the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1969, was the first researcher to introduce the English word quark into scientific terminology as early as in 1964. After accepting his hypothesis of quarks in the world science, most physicists adopted the English term quark as standard in the physical terminology of most international languages (e.g. French quark, German Quark, Italian quark, Polish kwark, Portugal quark, Russian кварк, Spanish cuark, Turkish kuark, Ukrainian кварк ‘an elementary particle’) and it quickly became a widely recognized internationalism. It is not commonly known that Joyce’s verse facetiously imitated loud cries of German dairy women: Drei Mark für muster Quark! (literally “Three Marks for an excellent curd!”). In other words, E. quark ‘an elementary particle’ is motivated by the German term Quark m. ‘weiser Käse / curd, white cheese’, metaphorically ‘trifle, nonsense, trash, worthless thing’, which – according to most German and Slavic etymologists – represents an obvious Slavic borrowing (especially a Polish or Lower Sorbian loanword), cf. Pol. twaróg, dial. kwaruk m. ‘curd, white cheese’ (< Proto-Slavic *tvarogъ m. ‘id.’). It is suggested that the specialized term kwark represents the so called back-borrowing in the Polish language.

A survey of family unification models with bifundamental matter

Extensions of the Standard Model have been attempted from the bottom up and from the top down, yet there remains a largely unexplored middle ground. In this paper, using the Mathematica package LieART, we exhaustively enumerate embeddings of the Standard Model within the class of theories with bifundamental fermions in product gauge group SU(a)×SU(b)×SU(c) with no more generators than E6, while achieving SM family unification rather than replication. We incorporate simple phenomenological constraints and find 151 unique models, including 9 that have only vector-like particle content beyond-the-Standard Model (BSM) particles, which we conjecture belong to 5 infinite families of such models. We describe the potentially most viable models: namely, the 9 with strictly vector-like BSM content along with the 29 models we found with no more than 30 additional BSM chiral particles. These include models with fractional electric charge color singlets, and hence magnetic monopoles with multiple Dirac charge. This latter collection of models predicts chiral particles with masses near the electroweak scale accessible to current and future collider experiments.

Monopoles, exotic states and muon g-2 in TeV scale trinification

We study the low energy implications of a trinification model based on the gauge symmetry G= SU(3)_c times SU(3)_L times SU(3)_R, without imposing gauge coupling unification. A minimal model requires two Higgs multiplets that reside in the bi-fundamental representation of G, and this is shown to be adequate for accommodating the Standard Model (SM) fermion masses and generate, via loop corrections and seesaw mechanism, suitable masses for the heavy neutral leptons as well as the observed SM neutrinos. We estimate a lower bound of around 15 TeV for the masses of the new down- type quarks that are required by the SU(3)_L times SU(3)_R symmetry. We examine the resonant production at the LHC of the new gauge bosons, which leads to a lower bound of 16 TeV for the symmetry breaking scale of G. We also show how the muon g-2 anomaly can be resolved in the presence of these new gauge bosons and the heavy charged leptons present in the model. Finally, the model predicts the presence of a topologically stable monopole carrying three quanta (6 pi /e) of Dirac magnetic charge and mass gtrsim 160 TeV. If new matter fields lying in the fundamental representations of G are included, the model predicts the presence of exotic leptons, mesons and baryons carrying fractional electric charges such as pm e/3 and pm 2e/3, fully compatible with the Dirac quantization condition.

Fractional quantum Hall effect for extended objects: from skyrmionic membranes to dyonic strings

It is well known that in two spatial dimensions the fractional quantum Hall effect (FQHE) deals with point-like anyons that carry fractional electric charge and statistics. Moreover, in presence of a SO(3) order parameter, point-like skyrmions emerge and play a central role in the corresponding quantum Hall ferromagnetic phase. In this work, we show that in six spatial dimensions, the FQHE for extended objects shares very similar features with its two-dimensional counterpart. In the higher-dimensional case, the electromagnetic and hydrodynamical one-form gauge fields are replaced by three-form gauge fields and the usual point-like anyons are replaced by membranes, namely two-dimensional extended objects that can carry fractional charge and statistics. We focus on skyrmionic membranes, which are associated to a SO(5) order parameter and give rise to an higher-dimensional generalizaton of the quantum Hall ferromagnetism. We show that skyrmionic membranes naturally couple to the curved background through a generalized Wen-Zee term and can give us some insights about the chiral conformal field theory on the boundary. We then present a generalization of the Witten effect in six spatial dimensions by showing that one-dimensional extended monopoles (magnetic strings) in the bulk of the FQH states can acquire electric charge through an axion field by becoming dyonic strings.

Fractional corner magnetization of collinear antiferromagnets

Recent studies revealed that the electric multipole moments of insulators result in fractional electric charges localized to the hinges and corners of the sample. We here explore the magnetic analog of this relation. We show that a collinear antiferromagnet with spin $S$ defined on a $d$-dimensional cubic lattice features fractionally quantized magnetization ${M}_{\text{c}}^{z}=S/{2}^{d}$ at the corners. We find that the quantization is robust even in the presence of gapless excitations originating from the spontaneous formation of the N\'eel order, although the localization length diverges, suggesting a power-law localization of the corner magnetization. When the spin rotational symmetry about the $z$ axis is explicitly broken, the corner magnetization is no longer sharply quantized. Even in this case, we numerically find that the deviation from the quantized value is negligibly small based on quantum Monte Carlo simulations.

Electric Charge, Matter Distribution, and Baryon Asymmetry from Holographic Principle

Explaining baryon asymmetry (i.e., matter dominance) in the universe has been a vexing problem in physics. This analysis, based on the holographic principle, identifies fractional electric charge with the state of bits of information on the event horizon. Thermodynamics on the event horizon at the time of baryogenesis then estimates observed baryon asymmetry.

On colors and electric charges of quarks: modeling in terms of groups U(n) and SU(n,n)

A brief description of the multi-level model of the quark-gluon media is presented. In terms of this model, we use the Wigner–Segal approach to elementary particles and we modify the Han–Nambu scheme. By doing so, we suggest to view the proton’s electric charge as a special case of color charges of quarks. While fractional electric charges of quarks are interpreted as statistical averages of integer color charges.

3-Dimensional QCD Phase Diagrams for Strange Matter

In this work, we examine in detail the difference between constraining the electric charge fraction and isospin fraction when calculating the deconfinement phase transition in the presence of net strangeness. We present relations among charge and isospin fractions and the corresponding chemical potentials and draw 3-dimensional QCD phase diagrams for matter out of weak equilibrium. Finally, we briefly discuss how our results can be applied to comparisons of matter created in heavy ion collisions and binary neutron star mergers.

Electric charge quantisation in 331 models with exotic charges

The extensions of the Standard Model based on the $SU(3)_{C} \otimes SU(3)_{L} \otimes U(1)_{X}$ gauge group are known as 331 Models. Different properties such as the fermion assignment and the electric charges of the exotic spectrum, that defines a particular 331 model, are fixed by a $\beta$ parameter. In this article we study the electric charge quantization in two versions of the 331 models, set by the conditions $\beta=1/\left( 3\sqrt{3}\right)$ and $\beta=0$. In these frameworks, arise exotic particles, for instance, new leptons and gauge bosons with a fractional electric charge. Additionally, depending on the version, quarks with non-standard fractional electric charges or even neutral appear. Considering the definition of electric charge operator as a linear combination of the group generators that annihilates the vacuum, classical constraints from the invariance of the lagrangian, and gauge and mixed gauge-gravitational anomalies cancellation, the quantization of the electric charge can be verified in both versions.

CERN Beamline for Schools 2017 Student Experiment: Search for Isolated Fractionally Charged Particles

This article was mainly written by a team of high school students that have won the CERN Beamline for Schools (BL4S) competition in 2017. They had some help from professional scientists, in particular Branislav Ristic. The team had proposed to set up an experiment to search for elementary particles with a fractional electric charge. This paper describes the preparation of their proposal, experimental setup, detectors and data analysis throughout the search for such particles using a 10[Formula: see text]GeV[Formula: see text][Formula: see text] proton beam with a fixed iron target. It was clear to the team that the chance for finding such particles in a relatively simple experiment was minimal but that by doing this experiment they would learn a lot about experimental physics. Due to large amounts of noise, the result of the experiment is inconclusive. Further experimentation to search for these hypothesized particle is encouraged.

Topological orders of monopoles and hedgehogs: From electronic and magnetic spin-orbit coupling to quarks

Topological states of matter are, generally, quantum liquids of conserved topological defects. We establish this by constructing and analyzing topological field theories which describe the dynamics of field singularities using gauge fields. Homotopy groups are utilized to identify topologically protected singularities, and the conservation of their protected number is captured by a topological action term that unambiguously obtains from the given set of symmetries. Stable phases of these theories include quantum liquids with emergent massless Abelian and non-Abelian gauge fields, as well as topological orders with long-range quantum entanglement, fractional excitations, boundary modes and unconventional responses to external perturbations. This paper focuses on the derivation of topological field theories and basic phenomenological characterization of topological orders associated with homotopy groups $\pi_n(S^n)$, $n\ge 1$. These homotopies govern monopole and hedgehog topological defects in $d=n+1$ dimensions, and enable the generalization of both weakly-interacting and fractional quantum Hall liquids of vortices to $d>2$. Hedgehogs have not been in the spotlight so far, but they are particularly important defects of magnetic moments because they can be stimulated in realistic systems with spin-orbit coupling, such as chiral magnets and $d=3$ topological materials. We predict novel topological orders in systems with U(1)$\times$Spin($d$) symmetry in which fractional electric charge attaches to hedgehogs. Monopoles, the analogous defects of charge or generic U(1) currents, may bind to hedgehogs via Zeeman effect, or effectively emerge in purely magnetic systems. The latter can lead to spin liquids with different topological orders than that of the RVB spin liquid. Charge fractionalization of quarks in atomic nuclei is also seen as possibly arising from the charge-hedgehog attachment.

Abelian gauge theories on the lattice: θ-Terms and compact gauge theory with(out) monopoles

We discuss a particular lattice discretization of abelian gauge theories in arbitrary dimensions. The construction is based on gauging the center symmetry of a non-compact abelian gauge theory, which results in a Villain type action. We show that this construction has several benefits over the conventional U(1) lattice gauge theory construction, such as electric-magnetic duality, natural coupling of the theory to magnetically charged matter in four dimensions, complete control over the monopoles and their charges in three dimensions and a natural θ-term in two dimensions. Moreover we show that for bosonic matter our formulation can be mapped to a worldline/worldsheet representation where the complex action problem is solved. We illustrate our construction by explicit dualizations of the CP(N−1) and the gauge Higgs model in 2d with a θ term, as well as the gauge Higgs model in 3d with constrained monopole charges. These models are of importance in low dimensional anti-ferromagnets. Further we perform a natural construction of the θ-term in four dimensional gauge theories, and demonstrate the Witten effect which endows magnetic matter with a fractional electric charge. We extend this discussion to PSU(N)=SU(N)/ZN non-abelian gauge theories and the construction of discrete θ-terms on a cubic lattice.

Structures and Interactions of Quantum Particles Based on the Energy Circulation Theory

Although the quark model is widely accepted, it is unknown what the origin of the electric charge of a quark is and why the charge magnitudes are fractional and different among the [Formula: see text] and [Formula: see text] quarks. Here we propose a novel scheme for quantum particles independent of quantum chromodynamics and quarks. We previously reported the energy circulation theory, in which the fundamental force works between antiparallel energy movements based on momentums, and forms an energy circulation. The electric charge is the momentum in the hidden dimension of an energy circulation in hidden–space dimensions. In this paper, we examine the interactions between energy circulations precisely covering the whole range of distance, and derive formulas for strong and weak nuclear interactions. The strong force is an inter-circulation interaction by the fundamental force. The weak interaction is an orthogonal separation of an energy circulation in space–space dimensions to two halves. A quantum particle consists of one or plural energy circulations in a unit space of radius of the lowest-frequency hidden dimension. We propose the respective compositions of energy circulations for major particles so that they as much conform to reported decays, spin and rest-mass values. This new model of particles provides potential solutions to unexplained issues from the Standard Model as follows: The new model presents the theoretical origin of the electric charge and its elementary charge. Because elementary components of hadrons are energy circulations instead of quarks, it is not required to introduce a fractional electric charge. A composition of elementary energy circulations for a quantum particle shows its electric charge and mass (rest energy) by the addition of those of elements. Furthermore, the model successfully exhibits strong and weak nuclear interactions as well as the electric force.

On the Preon Model

One of the fundamental questions is that “what the matter is composed of?” In 1897, atoms are known as the basic building blocks of matter. In the year 1911, Ernest Rutherford demonstrated that when alpha particles are scattered on a thin gold foil that the atom is composed of mostly empty space with a dense core at its center which is called the nucleus. Thereafter, protons and neutrons were discovered. In 1956, McAllister and Hofstadter published experimental results of elastic scattering of the electrons from a hydrogen target which revealed that the proton has an internal structure. In 1964, Gell-Mann (and independently) Zweig proposed that nucleons are composed of point-like particles which are called quarks. These quarks are postulated to have spin-1/2, fractional electric charge. Combinations of different flavors of quarks yield protons and neutrons which belong to the type of particles called baryons (built up from three quarks) and mesons as (quark and an antiquark). These two groups of particles are categorized as hadrons. The quarks showed further decay properties which suggested that they have a substructure.

Surfaces and slabs of fractional topological insulator heterostructures

Fractional topological insulators (FTI) are electronic topological phases in $(3+1)$ dimensions enriched by time reversal (TR) and charge $U(1)$ conservation symmetries. We focus on the simplest series of fermionic FTI, whose bulk quasiparticles consist of deconfined partons that carry fractional electric charges in integral units of $e^\ast=e/(2n+1)$ and couple to a discrete $\mathbb{Z}_{2n+1}$ gauge theory. We propose massive symmetry preserving or breaking FTI surface states. Combining the long-ranged entangled bulk with these topological surface states, we deduce the novel topological order of quasi-$(2+1)$ dimensional FTI slabs as well as their corresponding edge conformal field theories.

Magnetic monopoles and free fractionally charged states at accelerators and in cosmic rays

Unified theories of strong, weak and electromagnetic interactions which have electric charge quantization predict the existence of topologically stable magnetic monopoles. Intermediate scale monopoles are comparable with detection energies of cosmic ray monopoles at IceCube and other cosmic ray experiments. Magnetic monopoles in some models can be significantly lighter and carry two, three or possibly even higher quanta of the Dirac magnetic charge. They could be light enough for their effects to be detected at the LHC either directly or indirectly. An example based on a D-brane inspired SU(3)C × SU(3)L × SU(3)R (trinification) model with the monopole carrying three quanta of Dirac magnetic charge is presented. These theories also predict the existence of color singlet states with fractional electric charge which may be accessible at the LHC.

AN ANTHOLOGY OF THE DISTINGUISHED ACHIEVEMENTS IN SCIENCE AND TECHNIQUE. PART 36: NOBEL PRIZE LAUREATES IN PHYSICS FOR 1995-1999

Purpose. Implementation of brief analytical review of the distinguished scientific achievements of the world scientists-physicists, awarded the Nobel Prize in physics for period 1995-1999. Methodology. Scientific methods of collection, analysis and analytical treatment of scientific and technical information of world level in area of modern theoretical and experimental physics. Results. The brief analytical review of the scientific openings and distinguished achievements of scientists-physicists is resulted in area of modern physical and technical problems which were marked the Nobel bonuses on physics for period 1995-1999. Originality. Systematization is executed with exposition in the short concentrated form of the known scientific and technical materials, devoted opening of tau-lepton, experimental discovery of electronic neutrino, opening of superfluidity of liquid helium-3, creation of methods of cooling and «capture» of atoms by a laser ray, opening of new form of quantum liquid with excitations of fractional electric charge and clearing up of quantum structure of electroweak interactions of elementary particles scientists-physicists. Practical value. Popularization and deepening of scientific and technical knowledges for students, engineer and technical specialists and research workers in area of modern theoretical and experimental physics, extending their scientific range of interests and further development of scientific and technical progress in human society.

Fractional Electric Charge and Massive Quasiparticles on the Domain Wall between Topological Insulators and Spin Ice Compounds

We have proposed the mass-creation mechanism on massless Dirac fermions on the domain wall between topological insulators and spin ice compounds through the interaction between the massless Dirac fermion and excited magnetic monopoles