Can you help with particle physics?

m_ridsdale

I'd really appreciate any help you can give me with the following questions:

Use lepton universality and lepton-quark symmetry (ignore quark mixing) to estimate the branching ratios for:

a) b -> c + e- + anti-electronneutrino
b) tau -> e- + anti-electronneutrino + tauneutrino

Surely (a) is not possible without quark mixing? Isn't it true that without quark mixing, quarks can change flavour but only within their generation, e.g. can have u -> d but not u -> s?

b) I think for this question I just need to look at the ratio of the masses of the mu and the e-, since all differences in their interactions are due to their difference in mass, is this correct? So the answer I would give would be mass(e-)/mass(mu).

Why does observation of the process
antimuneutrino + e- -> antimuneutrino + e-
constitute unambiguous evidence for weak neutral currents, whereas the observation of
antielectronneutrino + e- -> antielectronneutrino + e-
does not?

I've no idea about this, I'd have thought either scattering process could be an electromagnetic interaction; doesn't any interaction involving the Z have an equivalent involving photons?

Tom Mattson

This one's a little advanced for Homework Help. We typically get inclined planes and calculus problems. It will be more likely to get noticed here, in Theoretical Physics.

I'll take a stab at it later.

lethe

agreed.
shouldn t it be the ratio of the tau to the electron for this reaction?

photons cannot couple to neutral particles. so photons cannot interact with neutrinos.

but i d say the nu_e reaction is not unambiguous evidence for weak neutral currents, because it this reaction could procede with a W boson. not so in the nu_mu case.