Rishon Model of Elementary Particles

It has been proposed that the quarks and leptons consist of more fundamental particles called rishons. The T rishon may be defined as having mass and charge e/3. The V rishon is neutral and has little or no mass. The rishons have spin 1/2, carry color charge, and combine in triplets or rishon-antirishon pairs. Thus the electron is a TTT, the neutrino VVV, the down quark TVV, and the up quark TTV. If the T has somewhat greater color charge than the V, the down quark would have a net excess of the color carried by the T. The antiup quark TTV would appear to have a net deficiency of the color carried by the V, or equivalently, an excess of anticolor, and behave as an antiparticle. Hence the TTV would appear to have an excess of color and behave as a particle, in agreement with observation. The leptons have no net color. There is no need for hypercolor.

All particle interactions consist of rearrangements of rishons, or creation or annihilation of rishon-antirishon pairs. For example, beta-decay occurs when a down quark changes to an up quark, emitting an electron and neutrino:

TVV --> TTV + TTT + VVV

The massless particle was originally called a neutrino; it was later defined to be an antineutrino. This model favors the first choice.

If the binding between rishons is much greater than the binding between quarks or leptons, then quarks and leptons could associate without losing their identity, just as atoms can form molecules. Lepton number is also conserved if the VVV is assigned a negative lepton number.

The second and third generations of the electron and the quarks might be formed by adding one or two TT pairs to the first generation. The second and third generations of the neutrino might be formed by adding one or two VV pairs to the first generation. The force binding the rishons is evidently so great that the separate rishon wave functions