familon
noun/ˈfæmɪlɒn/
Etymology From famille + -on, patterned after other particle names.
1
Natural sciences, Physical sciences, Physics Particle A hypothetical Nambu–Goldstone boson arising from the spontaneous breaking of a global family symmetry that distinguishes between generations of quarks and leptons.
- 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.1983 November, S. P. Rosen, ELECTROWEAK INTERACTIONS AND BEYOND, in Proceedings of the Third LAMPF II Workshop, volume 2, page 1015:
- 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.1984 April 30, Energy Research Abstracts, volume 9, number 8, Technical Information Center, U. S. Department of Energy, page 2045:
1 more example
- 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.2019, Benjamin Wallisch, Cosmological Probes of Light Relics (Springer Theses), Springer Nature, page 90: