Quantcast
  • Register
PhysicsOverflow is a next-generation academic platform for physicists and astronomers, including a community peer review system and a postgraduate-level discussion forum analogous to MathOverflow.

Welcome to PhysicsOverflow! PhysicsOverflow is an open platform for community peer review and graduate-level Physics discussion.

Please help promote PhysicsOverflow ads elsewhere if you like it.

News

PO is now at the Physics Department of Bielefeld University!

New printer friendly PO pages!

Migration to Bielefeld University was successful!

Please vote for this year's PhysicsOverflow ads!

Please do help out in categorising submissions. Submit a paper to PhysicsOverflow!

... see more

Tools for paper authors

Submit paper
Claim Paper Authorship

Tools for SE users

Search User
Reclaim SE Account
Request Account Merger
Nativise imported posts
Claim post (deleted users)
Import SE post

Users whose questions have been imported from Physics Stack Exchange, Theoretical Physics Stack Exchange, or any other Stack Exchange site are kindly requested to reclaim their account and not to register as a new user.

Public \(\beta\) tools

Report a bug with a feature
Request a new functionality
404 page design
Send feedback

Attributions

(propose a free ad)

Site Statistics

206 submissions , 164 unreviewed
5,103 questions , 2,249 unanswered
5,355 answers , 22,795 comments
1,470 users with positive rep
820 active unimported users
More ...

  Submission Creation Requests (archived)

+ 6 like - 0 dislike
16669 views

For users without direct submission privileges. Please submit a paper from the Submit Paper page.

closed as a duplicate of: Submission Creation Requests
asked May 30, 2014 in Closed Questions by Dilaton (6,240 points) [ revision history ]
closed Jul 14, 2015 as per community consensus

1 Answer

+ 0 like - 0 dislike

[TEMPORARILY ON HOLD] (see comments and Q&A)

Hello,

Please review my paper http://vixra.org/abs/1408.0196

Bootstrapping Generations

Authors: Alejandro Rivero

A supersymmetric version of Chew's "democratic bootstrap" argument predicts the existence of three generations of particles, with one quark, of type "up", more massive that the other five.

It is a condensation of the arxiv papers http://arxiv.org/abs/hep-ph/0512065, http://arxiv.org/abs/0710.1526 and http://arxiv.org/abs/0910.4793.

EDIT: The point is, given a SUSY model, ask for "nuclear democracy" in the old sense of every particle can be built as a composite of others. The paper then studies the particular case of building the scalar sector from the particles in the fermionic sector.

answered Aug 28, 2014 by - (260 points) [ revision history ]
reshown Jul 14, 2015 by dimension10

I am afraid you will not get very kind review, as the paper misunderstands the nature of the bootstrap condition, and substitutes a strange new thing that should not be associated to this name. If you wish to get a kinder review, you could ask about the subject as a question on physics.stackexchange: "Does it make sense to postulate an equal number of quark states and quark-quark bound states?" I would prefer if we do not import this submission, because you will simply get hostile comments regarding the misunderstanding of the bootstrap, and regarding the incompatibility of the boson-fermion counting equality you postulate with the standard model, or any supersymmetric extension of it.
 

I am afraid that such question would get even more hostile comments because without reading of the paper the answer seems obviously "no".  And in any case,  I would hope that the review will also get some constructive comment. The result is interesting and I think that some effort should be done to save it.

But about the meaning of "democratic" and "bootstrap" in Chew's work, I agree that it could be useful to do a generic question. It seems that Chew keep changing the use of the word as the research evolved.

EDIT: in fact, the formulation of your question is already a hint to improve the paper. It could be useful to decompose the question in two separate objections: "has it sense to postulate that some elementary particles can be seen as composites of other ones?" and "has it sense to request the same number of bosonic and fermionic degrees of freedom in a theory"?

The question you are asking in the request is a really good one: is it possible for a supersymmetry to link fundamental and composite particles? To link constituents to bound-states? This question will be well received here for sure. Also, I don't know the answer. You should ask on Q&A, and if nobody knows for a long time, it might be an open question (I don't think it is open, but maybe) Your submission will needlessly generate negative reviews for what is essentially a preliminary effort to find an answer to a very nice question.

Well, the paper really does not address if the fermionic sector is fundamental or composite.

Ok, I have done the susy question too.

Still, I'd also like to launch the paper to review, and after one year we can join and count which post has generated more hostile comments :-D

@arivero: We are still in beta, and we are trying to attract professionals. Papers that are too distant from professional interest will dissuade professionals from joining. I am asking you not to please not push the matter, your paper can get a review eventually if you insist, but it will be a negative one, and you will have a negative reputation, and then you will lose your voting rights.

When you ask a paper to go in reviews, it is expected to contain original results, while your paper contains only state counting which can be reproduced quickly by others. Such state-counting can be done in the body of a Q&A question, you can just write a sketch and people will understand what you mean.

If you had a real model of how to do what you want, it would be appropriate for reviews, but there is no full model in there, nor a sketch of one. This is why it would get negative reviews, and this would be a pity for such a nice question. If you stick to Q&A, you will get positive responses for sure.

I think that you miss the logic of the paper. It proves (by solving a system of three integer equations, which is not the same that "state-counting") that any model of such composites would predict exactly three generations, right-handed neutrinos, and a separate top quark. It is a model-independent prediction. 

What I am afraid is that if I include a model, whatever it were, the criticism will be on the model, missing completely the point of the generality of the result. 

It is true that solving the system of integer equations is a simple undergraduate exam question. But I have never seen the result in the literature, not even as a footnote elsewhere. 

Ok, lets substitute the review request by a different question and see how it fares before insisting in the review. Perhaps the moderators will need a new mark [FROZEN], besides [REJECTED] or [ACCEPTED]  :-D

BTW, if eventually the review is finally created, this set of comments could be useful there.

I did not miss the logic of the paper--- your observation is original, but it is not useful absent a model which can do something with bound states and fundamental states.

For specific problems (there are infinitely many problems with such logic) There are misunderstandings there about the state counting: for example, you have 3 colors of quarks, but the bound states are only colorless, you have colorless bound states of three quarks, there are no bound states of neutrinos, etc, so that the actual method by which you get your "three generations" is completely incorrect.

But the general question is ok--- can you mix bound states and fundamental states with SUSY? That's a great question, and it will get upvotes. I'm just giving political advice here. Your paper will not be reviewed positively, but your general idea of mixing composite and elementary particles using supersymmetry is interesting.

Regarding the status of your paper, perhaps "In discussion" is better than frozen. At the end of the process, we would like to have a professional submission to review, and for you to get positive feedback. It's better than a superficial review which is just pointing out big gaps and ignoring the main idea.

Amusingly, your recollection of the paper, 24 hours after, is very different of the paper itself. It explicitly instructs the reader to imagine the composites as terminations of strings, and thus it is pretty obvious that each composite contains either a pair quark/antiquark, or a pair of quarks (or a pair of antiquarks). The former is neutral, the later is coloured. No combinations of three quarks are even mentioned in all the paper. No bound states of neutrinos. Perhaps this point should be written more clearly: the string works exactly as a colour string. I will take note of it, for the next version.

The only objection at this level is that Barion number seems to be violated, as two quarks pair to form an antisquark. And same with Lepton number; so B+L between fermions and scalars always differs in one unit.

Now, from your remark I see that the mention of "state-counting" was a educated way of telling that the main body of the paper was, in your view, completely wrong and than then the result I was claiming did not follow from the assumptions. I am always confused by this "academic politesse". Of course if you thought (think) that the final claim did (do) not stand, only the first lines of the paper are useful as a generic question.  

A quark-antiquark pair has two irreducible pieces: a color neutral piece and also a piece colored like a gluon--- a red up quark and an antiblue down antiquark are colored, for example. Only the color neutral piece can be interpreted as the quark content for a physical state, but the colored piece should perhaps contribute to the state counting if you are making a symmetry. I don't know how you're supposed to count. You don't have any example of how this symmetry is supposed to work, so there is no point in being so pedantic about counting, let alone concluding anything about generation number.

The bound states of quarks are not enumerated correctly in the paper, you are simply counting pairs of fermions arbitrarily, without any model to give the counting sense, nor to say which pairs are bound states that "count" and which combinations are bound states that don't count. Presumably an Iron nucleus doesn't count as a bound state of quarks, otherwise your counting would be terribly off.

So I don't think that the final claims do not stand, I know so. The paper is all wishful thinking on your part. If you want, me or someone else could write a scathing review, but that wouldn't be fair, because you have an interesting idea, namely that perhaps there is a symmetry between bosonic bound states and fermionic constituents. The way to get you credit for this thinking is to ask this question independently of the calculations in the paper.

Then people discuss your idea, and if it works, then you can make some models, then you can see what the counting relation is in the model, and that eventually tells you what counting analysis is correct to do. Right now, you just made up the counting, and the whole paper is wishful thinking.

The objection at this level is that everything is all wrong in obvious ways. I wasn't being coy or polite, I meant that the paper will get torn apart because the counting is unjustified by anything, you made it up arbitrarily and then got three generations out. But you could justify such a counting if you first describe a model with some sort of supersymmetry relation between elementary fermions and bound states, and then show how the counting works in such a model, and make an extrapolation from something one can understand fully.

But it's not really my place to make such judgements here in the comments to the submission, I would normally say so in a review. But right now, we are in beta, and we are pickier about submissions, because we want to set a professional tone.

Definitely I need to improve my communication skills. From the paper:

... is constituted by a string terminated in a pair of quarks.
With this imaginery, we can try a weaker version of the democratic bootstrap.

I read this (actually, I wrote this) as telling that each scalar composite contains two quarks. From this all the combinations follow. It is not the case that I am cherry picking the quarks. (EDIT: but is is true that I am implicitly assuming that for each combination we have only one scalar. I should be more explicit on this point).

With this ansatz I show that there is no solution. So then I relax, setting that only $r,s$ quarks can be attached to the string: 

We postulate thus that only a subset of ”light quarks” are in the terminations of the string and then able to form composites.

(EDIT: ok, I think that the indication "a subset" can be the origin of the confusion. I do not choose randomly what quarks are allowed to play, but instead I explore all the space of possibilities: I set two variables s,r for the number of up-type and down-type quarks that are allowed to be, say, at the end of the string).

And then I show, by solving the equations for r,s and the total number N of generations, that there is a unique solution, s=2, r=3, N=3

The paper you describe is not my paper.

(EDIT: I will wrote and upload a v2 addressing the problems you mention).

The question you are asking in the request is a really good one: is it possible for a supersymmetry to link fundamental and composite particles? To link constituents to bound-states? This question will be well received here for sure

@Ron what is your definition of "well received"? A first comment about doing off-topic remarks does not seem a good reception to me. 

Your remarks I thought were off topic, but the question is upvoted. I just moved them to chat, and left a link, but I unhid the original comment, I just moved the ones after I stuck my big nose in it.

The call "off topic" is usually pretty clear, but in this case I might have made a mistake. Sorry. I see now that you mean that Schwarz might have intended the RNS model as a quark-meson string, with the fermionic oscillations being quarks and the bosonic oscillations mesons. That's maybe possible, it just isn't what the interpretation is today, after GSO, where we know the content of the theory is supergravity. But it might have been what they were thinking in 1971.

Apologies, I restored your comment, and sorry for being a dick.





user contributions licensed under cc by-sa 3.0 with attribution required

Your rights
...