Hypercharge - Practical Obsolescence

Practical Obsolescence

Hypercharge was a concept developed in the 1960s, to organize groups of particles in the "particle zoo" and to develop ad-hoc conservation laws based on their observed transformations. With the advent of the quark model, it is now obvious that (if one only includes the up, down and strange quarks out of the total 6 quarks in the Standard Model), hypercharge Y is the following combination of the numbers of up (n_u), down (n_d), and strange quarks(n_s):

In modern descriptions of hadron interaction, it has become more obvious to draw Feynman diagrams that trace through individual quarks composing the interacting baryons and mesons, rather than counting hypercharge quantum numbers. Weak hypercharge, however, remains of practical use in various theories of the electroweak interaction.