The price of natural flavour conservation in neutral weak interactions

The natural conservation of flavours to O(G_F²) in neutral weak interactions severely constrains choices of gauge groups as well as their fermion representations. In the absence of exactly conserved quantum numbers other than charge, and of |ΔQ| ? 2 charged currents, essentially the only weak and electromagnetic gauge groups whose neutral interactions naturally conserve all flavours are SU(2)_L ? U(1) and SU(2)_L ? [U(1)]². The plausible extensions of these gauge groups to grand unified models including the strong interactions are based on SU(5) and SO(10) respectively. Making the SU(5) model completely natural, including in the Higgs sector, gives the prediction $\text{m}{}_{\mathrm{<mtext>d</mtext>}}\text{/m}{}_{\mathrm{<mtext>e</mtext>}}\text{? m}{}_{\mathrm{<mtext>s</mtext>}}\text{/m}{}_{\mathrm{\mu }}\text{? m}{}_{\mathrm{<mtext>b</mtext>}}\text{/m}{}_{\mathrm{\tau }}\text{? 2605}$ where τ is the probable new heavy lepton and b is the conjectured third flavour of charge $\text{?1}\text{3}\text{quark}$. The SO(10) model contains a potential SU(2)_L ? SU(2)_R ? U(1) weak and electromagnetic gauge group, and has a complicated Higgs structure which does not naturally conserve quark flavours.     

On braid groups

A dissertation in the Department of Mathematics submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School of Arts and Science in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy at New York University.     

Reflection asymmetry of the fission transition nucleus 235U

An analysis of the energy variation of the fission cross section and fragment angular distributions for the ²³⁴U (n,f) reaction reveals that the nuclear is reflection assymetric at the inner barrier.