Is the Isospin Symmetry of Strong Interactions Violated at the Quark Level?

Abstract

In QCD, isospin symmetry of strong interactions is assumed. Therefore the strong interactions in heavy ion collisions should produce equal amounts of charged and neutral kaons. Recently however an anomaly was discovered by Wojciech Brylinski who was analyzing data from the NA61/SHINE collaboration at CERN for his thesis. There was a strikingly large imbalance between charged and neutral kaons in argon–scandium collisions. Instead of being produced in roughly equal numbers, charged kaons were produced 18.4 percent more often than neutral kaons. Now this anomaly has been confirmed. NA61/SHINE's data in collisions with 11.9 GeV cm energy per nucleon pair contradicts the hypothesis of equal yields with a 4.7σ significance. Unless electromagnetic interactions violating the isospin symmetry manage to cause the isospin asymmetry, the key assumption of QCD that electroweak and color interactions are independent, is wrong. Needless to say, this would mean a revolution in the standard model. The basic prediction of TGD is that color and electroweak interactions are strongly correlated at the fundamental level and in this article a possible explanation of the anomaly in the TGD framework will be considered.