The discovery of the pion in 1947 seemed to restore order to the study of particle physics, but this order did not last long. Later in the year Clifford Butler and George Rochester, two British physicists studying cosmic rays, discovered the first examples of yet another type of new particle. The new particles were heavier than the pion or muon but lighter than the proton, with a mass of about 800 times the electron’s mass. Within the next few years, researchers found copious examples of these particles, as well as other new particles that were heavier even than the proton. The evidence seemed to indicate that these particles were created in strong interactions in nuclear matter, yet the particles lived for a relatively long time without themselves interacting strongly with matter. This strange behaviour in some ways echoed the earlier problem with Yukawa’s supposed meson, but the solution for the new “strange” particles proved to be different.

By 1953 at least four different kinds of strange particles had been observed. In an attempt to bring order into this increasing number of subatomic particles, Murray Gell-Mann in the United States and Nishijima Kazuhiko in Japan independently suggested a new conservation law. They argued that the strange particles must possess some new property, dubbed “strangeness,” that is conserved in the strong nuclear reactions in which the particles are created. In the decay of the particles, however, a different, weaker force is at work, and this weak force does not conserve strangeness—as with isospin symmetry, which is respected only by the strong force.

According to this proposal, particles are assigned a strangeness quantum number, S, which can have only integer values. The pion, proton, and neutron have S = 0. Because the strong force conserves strangeness, it can produce strange particles only in pairs, in which the net value of strangeness is zero. This phenomenon, the importance of which was recognized by both Nishijima and the American physicist Abraham Pais in 1952, is known as associated production.

SU(3) symmetry

With the introduction of strangeness, physicists had several properties with which they could label the various subatomic particles. In particular, values of mass, electric charge, spin, isospin, and strangeness gave physicists a means of classifying the strongly interacting particles—or hadrons—and of establishing a hierarchy of relationships between them. In 1962 Gell-Mann and Yuval Neʾeman, an Israeli scientist, independently showed that a particular type of mathematical symmetry provides the kind of grouping of hadrons that is observed in nature. The name of the mathematical symmetry is SU(3), which stands for “special unitary group in three dimensions.”

SU(3) contains subgroups of objects that are related to each other by symmetrical transformations, rather as a group describing the rotations of a square through 90° contains the four symmetrical positions of the square. Gell-Mann and Neʾeman both realized that the basic subgroups of SU(3) contain either 8 or 10 members and that the observed hadrons can be grouped together in 8s or 10s in the same way. (The classification of the hadron class of subatomic particles into groups on the basis of their symmetry properties is also referred to as the Eightfold Way.) For example, the proton, neutron, and their relations with spin 1/2 fall into one octet, or group of 8, while the pion and its relations with spin 0 fit into another octet (see the figure). A group of 9 very short-lived resonance particles with spin 3/2 could be seen to fit into a decuplet, or group of 10, although at the time the classification was introduced, the 10th member of the group, the particle known as the Ω⁻ (or omega-minus), had not yet been observed. Its discovery early in 1964, at the Brookhaven National Laboratory in Upton, New York, confirmed the validity of the SU(3) symmetry of the hadrons.