Murray Gell-Mann

Murray Gell-Mann (1929–2019) was an American theoretical physicist who helped develop the quark model and received the 1969 Nobel Prize in Physics for work on elementary particles.

George Zweig: An American physicist who independently proposed a quark model in 1964, calling its constituents aces. Zweig proposed a constituent model alongside Gell-Mann’s, with a different name and presentation.
Quark model: A model in which hadrons are made from quarks and antiquarks bound by the strong interaction. It supplied constituents that could account for the patterns the Eightfold Way revealed.
Particle zoo: The rapidly expanding collection of known subatomic particles discovered in the mid-twentieth century. Its growing complexity motivated the search for an underlying order.
Quantum chromodynamics: The quantum field theory of the strong interaction among quarks and gluons. The quark model became part of the framework later formalized as the theory of the strong force.
Richard Feynman: An American theoretical physicist who developed quantum electrodynamics and introduced the parton model of hadrons. Feynman’s partons offered a competing account of the constituents probed inside protons.
SU(3) flavor symmetry: An approximate symmetry among the up, down, and strange quarks that organizes hadrons into multiplets. This mathematical symmetry underlay Gell-Mann’s classification of strongly interacting particles.
Strange particles: Hadrons produced readily in strong interactions but decaying unusually slowly through weak interactions. Their puzzling production and decay patterns helped prompt Gell-Mann’s strangeness concept.
Standard Model: The theory describing elementary particles and three fundamental interactions: electromagnetic, weak, and strong. Gell-Mann’s quark model contributed to the particle framework incorporated into this broader theory.
Abdus Salam: A Pakistani theoretical physicist who shared the 1979 Nobel Prize for electroweak unification. Salam shared Gell-Mann’s interest in organizing fundamental particles and forces through symmetry.
Baryon decuplet: A ten-particle multiplet of baryons predicted by the Eightfold Way, including the omega-minus baryon. Its missing member led Gell-Mann to predict a particle later found experimentally.

Linked from 19 pages