Eightfold Way (physics)
In physics, the Eightfold Way is a theory organizing subatomic hadrons. The name was coined by American physicist Murray Gell-Mann as an allusion to the Noble Eightfold Path of Buddhism. An equivalent theory was independently proposed by Israeli physicist Yuval Ne'eman and led to the subsequent development of the quark model.
The Eightfold Way organizes the mesons and spin-1/2 baryons into an octet, the principles of the Eightfold Way also applied to the spin-3/2 baryons, forming a decuplet. However, one of the particles of this decuplet had never been previously observed. Gell-Mann called this particle the
Ω−
and predicted in 1962 that it would have a strangeness −3, electric charge −1 and a mass near 1680 MeV/c2. In 1964, a particle closely matching these predictions was discovered by a particle accelerator group at Brookhaven. Gell-Mann received the 1969 Nobel Prize in Physics for his work on the theory of elementary particles.
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