THE FLAVOR SYMMETRY IN THE STANDARD MODEL AND THE TRIALITY SYMMETRY

Abstract

A Dirac fermion is expressed by a four-component spinor, which is a combination of two quaternions and can be treated as an octonion. The octonion possesses the triality symmetry, which defines symmetry of fermion spinors and bosonic vector fields. The triality symmetry relates three sets of spinors and two sets of vectors, which are transformed among themselves via transformations G23, G12, G13, G123 and G132. If the electromagnetic (EM) interaction is sensitive to the triality symmetry, i.e. EM probe selects one triality sector, EM signals from the five transformed world would not be detected and be treated as the dark matter. According to an astrophysical measurement, the ratio of the dark to ordinary matter in the universe as a whole is almost exactly 5. We expect quarks are insensitive to the triality, and triality will appear as three times larger flavor degrees of freedom in the lattice simulation.