Quark Model - History

History

Developing classification schemes for hadrons became a burning question after new experimental techniques uncovered so many of them that it became clear that they could not all be elementary. These discoveries led Wolfgang Pauli to exclaim "Had I foreseen that, I would have gone into botany," and Enrico Fermi to advise his student Leon Lederman: "Young man, if I could remember the names of these particles, I would have been a botanist." These new schemes earned Nobel prizes for experimental particle physicists, including Luis Alvarez, who was at the forefront of many of these developments. Several early proposals, such as the one by Shoichi Sakata, were unable to explain all the data. A version developed by Moo-Young Han and Yoichiro Nambu was also eventually found untenable. The quark model in its modern form was developed by Murray Gell-Mann and Kazuhiko Nishijima. The model received important contributions from Yuval Ne'eman and George Zweig. The spin 3⁄₂ Ω− baryon, a member of the ground state decuplet, was a prediction of the model. When it was discovered in an experiment at Brookhaven National Laboratory, Gell-Mann received a Nobel prize for his work on the quark model.