The KEY Ingredients of Spacetime: A Particle-Centric Ontological Theory of the Standard Model, Dark Matter, Relativity, Gravity, and Dark Energy

I am introducing the particle-centric KEY model as an interface layer between the inaccessible fabric of spacetime, and the empirically accessible physics of the Standard Model and of Cosmology. The KEY model thus attempts to provide an epistemologically grounded ontology of reality.The KEY model is aligned with the Standard Model, it paves the way for a unification of the electroweak force and the strong force, it provides Dark Matter candidates including ‘Dark Matter chemistry’, and it is aligned with Quantum Mechanics, General Relativity, Gravity, and Dark Energy. This is accomplished by presupposing a discrete fabric of spacetime that permits the creation and annihilation of ‘atoms’ of space, and that embeds persistent topological structures that manifest as elementary particles. The KEY model is compatible with Stephen Wolfram’s hypergraph model, and I consider this model to be a promising candidate for describing reality at a fundamental level. The KEY model is, however, also compatible with alternative discrete spacetime substrates.The KEY model is adopting several features from Bilson-Thompson’s topological helon model, but there are some relevant deviations. Fermions (J = 1/2) are represented by a single 3-helon bundle, while gauge bosons (J = 1) are represented by a composite of two 3-helon bundles. The individual helons reside on three distinct orthogonal ‘channels’ (or sectors) labelled K (blacK ), E (whitE ), and Y (graY ), and each helon occupies one of the three states in {−, 0, +} corresponding to the electric charges {−1/3, 0, +1/3}. The total electric charge Q and the color charge(s) C of particles are determined by the configuration of the respective 3-helon bundles, and vice versa.The configuration space of the KEY model—represented by 3 ⊗ 3 ⊗ 3 = 3 ⊕ 12 ⊕ 12 combinations of 3-helon bundles—is associated with 3 leptons, 12 quarks, and 12 ‘darks’ (Dark Matter candidates). Other particle properties like, e.g., parity and generation (family) are associated with extra topological features. Standard Model particle interactions (information processing) involve intra-channel helon permutations and annihilations within each of the three KEY channels, but no inter-channel permutations. The electroweak unification is associated with the intra-channel annihilation of ‘−’ and ‘+’ helons, and a grand unification is associated with the inter-channel exchange of helons.The interactions involving two fermions and one gauge boson yield a total of (3·4−2)^3 = 1000 combinations, among which some are redundant due to symmetries, and some are suppressed or forbidden due to constraints. Among the remaining 340 combinations, there are no lepton-quark interactions, but I identified 12 potential lepton-dark interactions, and 24 potential quark-dark interactions.