familon

English

Etymology

From famille +‎ -on, patterned after other particle names.

Pronunciation

  • IPA(key): /ˈfæmɪlɒn/

Noun

familon (plural familons)

  1. (physics, particle physics) A hypothetical Nambu–Goldstone boson arising from the spontaneous breaking of a global family symmetry that distinguishes between generations of quarks and leptons.
    • 1983 November, S. P. Rosen, ELECTROWEAK INTERACTIONS AND BEYOND, in Proceedings of the Third LAMPF II Workshop, volume 2, page 1015:
      It could be the axion associated with the Peccei-Quinn symmetry for strong CP invariance, or it could be the "familon'", a Goldstone boson that is associated with family symmetries and was discussed by Wilczek at the TSIMESS Workshop at Santa Cruz.
    • 1984 April 30, Energy Research Abstracts, volume 9, number 8, Technical Information Center, U. S. Department of Energy, page 2045:
      For massive neutrinos that can decay by emission of a familon (f), a flavor-changing axion, the upper bound on the cosmic energy density of the decay products yields (1) an upper bound on the familon decay constant, and consequently (2) a lower bound on other f emission rates.
    • 2019, Benjamin Wallisch, Cosmological Probes of Light Relics (Springer Theses), Springer Nature, page 90:
      Below the EWSB scale, the leading coupling of the familon to fermions becomes marginal after replacing the Higgs in (4.13) with its vacuum expectation value.
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