| Imagine a collider that could be fine-tuned in the amount of energy released, and set it to the 1876 MeV required to make a proton-antiproton pair. Then that's exactly what you'd get. |
p+ p- |
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| Now pretend you doubled the energy of the collision...you'd get two proton-antiproton pairs. |
p+p-
p+p- |
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| But what if you throttled back halfway, to where you'd have three proton's worth of energy. Well, you can't make three protons, because they're baryons and can only be made with anti-baryons, so you'd have enough energy to make one pair and then you'd have some left over. What form can that take? Why pions, of course! Little subatomic alpha particles made of neutrinos! Some would stick with the protons to make strange baryons. Others might go flying off stuck to each other but without sticking to protons, and those would be kaons!
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Omega Xi |
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Conclusion: |
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If the electron was actually a charged neutrino, making the pion the subatomic form of alpha particle as I am suggesting, then the strange baryons are EXACTLY the sort of particles you would expect to be created when you had more energy available than one proton but less than a proton-antiproton pair.
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For those of you who don't see why this is important, the strange baryons are the particles whose existence prompted quarks to be hypothesized. To explain their existence without quarks removes the need for quarks entirely.
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