The strange topology that is reshaping physics

Physics of Strange Matter

All known nuclei are made of the two nucleons, the proton and the neutron. Besides those two lightest baryons there exist still a couple of other stable (but weakly decaying) baryons, the hyperons. These were found for the first time in cosmic ray experiments and were entitled as ‘strange’ because of their unusual long lifetimes of about 10−10 sec. For their notation in the hadron zoo of elemen...

Theoretical Perspectives on Strange Physics

Kaons are heavy enough to have an interesting range of decay modes available to them, and light enough to be produced in sufficient numbers to explore rare modes with satisfying statistics. Kaons and their decays have provided at least two major breakthroughs in our knowledge of fundamental physics. They have revealed to us CP violation,l and their lack of flavor-changing neutral interactions w...

Topology in Physics ∗

The phenomenon of quantum number fractionalization is explained. The relevance of non-trivial phonon field topology is emphasized.

Seeding of Strange Matter with New Physics

At greater than nuclear densities, matter may convert into a mixture of nucleons, hyperons, dibaryons, and strangelets, thus facilitating the formation of strange matter even before the onset of the quark-matter phase transition. From a nonstrange dibaryon condensate, it may even be possible to leapfrog into strange matter with a certain new interaction, represented by an effective six-quark op...

Topology in Physics