- #1
jeebs
- 325
- 4
Hi,
I have been trying to find out about the upsilon meson (the bottom-antibottom quark pairing) for a piece of work I'm preparing. Since it has a neutral charge, I've been trying to find out how it was decided that what came to be known as the bottom quark had a charge of -1/3 rather than +2/3. I have a couple of things that I don't understand though.
I came across a paper, "Observation of a narrow resonance formed in e+e- annihilation at 9.46 GeV" (1978), which talks about measuring the mass of the particles produced via electron-positron collisions at the PLUTO detector. The upsilon production cross section apparently allows determination of the "electronic partial width", [tex]\Gamma _e_e[/tex], which as I understand it is synonymous with the branching ratio, ie. the ratio of a occurence of specific decay mode to the total decays.
(Since this experiment starts with colliding electrons & positrons, does this [tex]\Gamma _e_e[/tex] refers to a collision that produces no different particles, or does it refer to some new particle being made in the collision that has then decayed into an electron-positron pair again? Or is it something else entirely?)
Anyway, the paper says that "models for quark binding in nonrelativistic potentials relate [tex]\Gamma _e_e[/tex] to the charge of the constituent quarks". However, none of the references included in the paper give any explanation of this so-called model, and textbooks/googling around have not turned up anything useful, apart from one thing I spotted, a quark-antiquark interaction potential:
[tex] V(r) = -\frac{4}{3}\alpha _s\frac{1}{r} + \frac{r}{a^2} [/tex].
However, I have a problem with this - looking at the units/dimensions, this equation seems to make no sense. The paper I found this in says that "the length a is assumed to be a universal constant characterizing the quark confinement interaction", and "the Coulmobic interaction has a strength [tex] \alpha _s(m_Q) [/tex] whose mQ (presumably quark mass) dependence is given by the well known renormalization group formula from color gauge theory".
This means that we have potential energy (or just a potential) on the left hand side, and two quantities of different dimensions on the right hand side, so this has confused me.
I'm guessing that the relationship between quark mass, [tex]\Gamma _e_e[/tex] and the quark charge is contained in this [tex] \alpha _s(m_Q) [/tex] thing, but I'm still none the wiser really.
Can anyone clear any of this stuff up for me?
Thanks.
I have been trying to find out about the upsilon meson (the bottom-antibottom quark pairing) for a piece of work I'm preparing. Since it has a neutral charge, I've been trying to find out how it was decided that what came to be known as the bottom quark had a charge of -1/3 rather than +2/3. I have a couple of things that I don't understand though.
I came across a paper, "Observation of a narrow resonance formed in e+e- annihilation at 9.46 GeV" (1978), which talks about measuring the mass of the particles produced via electron-positron collisions at the PLUTO detector. The upsilon production cross section apparently allows determination of the "electronic partial width", [tex]\Gamma _e_e[/tex], which as I understand it is synonymous with the branching ratio, ie. the ratio of a occurence of specific decay mode to the total decays.
(Since this experiment starts with colliding electrons & positrons, does this [tex]\Gamma _e_e[/tex] refers to a collision that produces no different particles, or does it refer to some new particle being made in the collision that has then decayed into an electron-positron pair again? Or is it something else entirely?)
Anyway, the paper says that "models for quark binding in nonrelativistic potentials relate [tex]\Gamma _e_e[/tex] to the charge of the constituent quarks". However, none of the references included in the paper give any explanation of this so-called model, and textbooks/googling around have not turned up anything useful, apart from one thing I spotted, a quark-antiquark interaction potential:
[tex] V(r) = -\frac{4}{3}\alpha _s\frac{1}{r} + \frac{r}{a^2} [/tex].
However, I have a problem with this - looking at the units/dimensions, this equation seems to make no sense. The paper I found this in says that "the length a is assumed to be a universal constant characterizing the quark confinement interaction", and "the Coulmobic interaction has a strength [tex] \alpha _s(m_Q) [/tex] whose mQ (presumably quark mass) dependence is given by the well known renormalization group formula from color gauge theory".
This means that we have potential energy (or just a potential) on the left hand side, and two quantities of different dimensions on the right hand side, so this has confused me.
I'm guessing that the relationship between quark mass, [tex]\Gamma _e_e[/tex] and the quark charge is contained in this [tex] \alpha _s(m_Q) [/tex] thing, but I'm still none the wiser really.
Can anyone clear any of this stuff up for me?
Thanks.