Experimental sensitivity to rare decay processes will be greatly increased by the upgrade of the Cornell Electron Storage Ring and its detector facility. Our present partial understanding of the physical world is embodied in the Standard Model. It relates the behavior of matter in all its forms to the properties of a few fundamental constituents- the six kinds of quarks and six kinds of leptons. It unifies the phenomena of electromagnetism, weak decays, and the strong interaction that binds hadrons and nuclei, and explains them in terms of the exchange of several kinds of intermediate vector bosons- the photon, the W and Z, and the gluon. It successfully correlates the results of many experiments. But it is widely recognized as being incomplete.
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