Paper detail

A model of possible gravitational confinement of fast light particles

According to special relativity and the equivalence principle, the Newtonian gravitational force between two particles with relativistic velocities increases significantly with velocity and in fact becomes unbound as the latter approaches c. One may thus construct a deterministic model of three fast rotating light particles which uses gravitation as the attractive force, special relativity, the weak equivalence principle and introduces angular momentum quantization as in the Bohr model of the H atom. The model shows the existence of stable rotational states corresponding to highly relativistic particle velocities with radii in the fm range. When the rest masses of the three light particles is in the mass range of neutrinos (~0.1 eV/c^2), then surprisingly the rest masses and Compton wavelengths of these rotational states are found to correspond to those of baryons and in fact the masses (~1 GeV/c^2) reproduce quite well the light baryon mass spectrum. Interestingly the model also predicts a lower limit for the lifetime of the baryons which is consistent with their measured lifetimes and yields a good approximation for their magnetic moments. It thus appears that this deterministic Bohr-type approach to subatomic phenomena, i.e. a classical special relativistic treatment coupled with the de Broglie wavelength expression to seek conformity with quantum mechanics, may be a useful zeroth-order model to explore some quantum gravity problems.