Preon Trinity - a new model of leptons and quarks

A new model for the substructure of quarks, leptons and weak gauge bosons is discussed. It is based on three fundamental and absolutely stable spin-1/2 preons. Its preon flavour SU(3) symmetry leads to a prediction of nine quarks, nine leptons and nine heavy vector bosons. One of the quarks has charge $-4e/3$, and is speculated to be the top quark (whose charge has not been measured). The flavour symmetry leads to three conserved lepton numbers in all known weak processes, except for some neutrinos, which might either oscillate or decay. There is also a (Cabibbo) mixing of the $d$ and $s$ quarks due to an internal preon-antipreon annihilation channel. An identical channel exists inside the composite $Z^0$, leading to a relation between the Cabibbo and Weinberg mixing angles.