Preon Trinity

We present a new minimal model for the substructure of all known quarks, leptons and weak gauge bosons, based on only three fundamental and stable spin-1 / 2 preons. As a consequence, we predict three new quarks, three new leptons, and six new vector bosons. One of the new quarks has charge − 4 e/ 3. The model explains the apparent conservation of three lepton numbers, as well as the so-called Cabibbo-mixing of the d and s quarks, and predicts electromagnetic decays or oscillations between the neutrinos ¯ ν µ ( ν µ ) and ν e (¯ ν e ). Other neutrino oscillations, as well as rarer quark mixings and CP violation can come about due to a small quantum-mechanical mixing of two of the preons in the quark and lepton wave functions.