Proposal for the systematic naming of mesons and baryons

Twenty years ago, the Particle Data Group adopted a systematic naming convention for baryons: the symbols N, Δ, Λ, Σ, Ψ, and Ω were to identify the isospin and strangeness, The mesons, by contrast, have become an alphabet soup of uninformative names - theta, iota, xi, zeta, g/sub T/, g/sub s/, H, E, delta, h, g, r, kappa, etc. -, and in some cases identical names are used for mesons with different quantum numbers (A, B, and D). Furthermore, experimentalists are now discovering baryons that contain heavy quarks. It is therefore timely to consider systematic naming conventions both for mesons and for baryons with heavy quarks. The Particle Data Group is circulating this proposal in the hope of generating feedback, and we attach a sheet for responses. It should be emphasized that the Particle Tables would show both the old and new names for some time