Word.ws English Dictionary

familon

/ˈfæmɪlɒn/

familon noun: a hypothetical Nambu–Goldstone boson arising from the spontaneous breaking of a global family symmetry that distinguishes between generations of quarks and leptons.

Noun

familon (plural familons)

  1. (particle) A hypothetical Nambu–Goldstone boson arising from the spontaneous breaking of a global family symmetry that distinguishes between generations of quarks and leptons.
    • It could be the axion associated with the Peccei-Quinn symmetry for strong CP invariance, or it could be the "familon'", a Goldstone boson that is associated with family symmetries and was discussed by Wilczek at the TSIMESS Workshop at Santa Cruz.1983 November, S. P. Rosen, ELECTROWEAK INTERACTIONS AND BEYOND, in Proceedings of the Third LAMPF II Workshop, volume 2, page 1015
    • For massive neutrinos that can decay by emission of a familon (f), a flavor-changing axion, the upper bound on the cosmic energy density of the decay products yields (1) an upper bound on the familon decay constant, and consequently (2) a lower bound on other f emission rates.1984 April 30, Energy Research Abstracts, volume 9, number 8, Technical Information Center, U. S. Department of Energy, page 2045

Forms of familon

pluralfamilons

Origin of familon

From famille + -on, patterned after other particle names.

Questions about familon

What does familon mean?
Familon means a hypothetical Nambu–Goldstone boson arising from the spontaneous breaking of a global family symmetry that distinguishes between generations of quarks and leptons.
What part of speech is familon?
Familon is a noun.
How do you pronounce familon?
Familon is pronounced /ˈfæmɪlɒn/.
What is the plural of familon?
The plural of familon is familons.

Words near familon in the dictionary

  1. familistic
  2. familistical
  3. familistically
  4. familists
  5. famille rose
  6. familon
  7. familons
  8. famils
  9. family
  10. family allowance
  11. family allowances

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: familon (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

Last updated:

Cite this entry: “familon.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/familon. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.