Are Leptons as elementary as Quarks?

Abstract

Nucleons and electrons were once considered elementary particles, a role nowadays taken by quarks and leptons. Here, mainly at the group theoretical level, we examine the unorthodox idea that nucleons and electrons share the same level of compositeness after all. We do it by first trading color $SU(3)_C$ for color/leptocolor $SU(3)_C\times SU(3)_{\ell C}$ confining gauge symmetry. Standard model leptons, equipped with inherited Yukawa couplings, make then their appearance at the intermediate (gauge protected) $SU(3)_C\times SU(3)_L\times SU(3)_R$ trinification stage as three pre-lepton composites. The addition of an exclusively prescribed (on anomaly free and Pauli exclusion grounds) spontaneously broken $SU(3)_F$ horizontal link to the unification chain, in the spirit of "One three to rule them all", strikingly preserves the anti-symmetric structure of the single family fermionic wave function. The threefold quark/lepton (spectators + composites) flavor chiral representation is then necessarily supplemented by a trinification singlet composite Majorana neutrino. The scheme serendipitously predicts a novel anomaly free lepto/dark portal.