lepton number


Also found in: Encyclopedia, Wikipedia.
Related to lepton number: baryon number

lepton number

n
(Atomic Physics) physics a quantum number describing the behaviour of elementary particles, equal to the number of leptons present minus the number of antileptons. It is thought to be conserved in all processes. Symbol: l
Collins English Dictionary – Complete and Unabridged, 12th Edition 2014 © HarperCollins Publishers 1991, 1994, 1998, 2000, 2003, 2006, 2007, 2009, 2011, 2014
Mentioned in ?
References in periodicals archive ?
Its possible discovery will represent an irrefutable proof of lepton number violation, LNV.
In the minimal supersymmetric standard model (MSSM), unlike in the SM, the conservation of lepton number (L) and of baryon number (B) is not automatic: the superpotential can contain renormalizable and gauge invariant L- and B-violating terms.
After the pioneering discovery of the d = 5 operator [7] within the SM using the SM leptons, SM Higgs doublets, and [DELTA]L = 2 (L = Lepton number) unit of LNV, it turned out that the Seesaw mechanism [8-14] could be the simplest idea to explain the small neutrino mass and flavor mixing where the SM can be extended by the SM-gauge singlet Majorana type RHNs.
Yaguna, "Left-right symmetry and lepton number violation at the Large Hadron electron Collider," Journal of High Energy Physics, vol.
The possibility of gauged and extended inverse seesaw mechanism with dominant contributions to both lepton flavor and lepton number nonconservation was at first noted in the context Pati-Salam model in [175] and in the context of non-SUSY SO(10) in [176, 177] with type I seesaw cancellation.
The neutrinoless double beta decay process violates lepton number by two units and thus its observation would imply the Majorana nature of the neutrinos, underscoring the importance of this process.
Each lepton family includes a new fermion singlet carrying no lepton number ([N.sub.R]) arranged under the SU[(3).sub.L] symmetry as a triplet ([v.sub.L], [l.sub.L], [N.sup.c.sub.R]) and a singlet [l.sub.R].