What happens when particles collide with their anti-particles?

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Discussion Overview

The discussion centers on the interactions that occur when particles collide with their corresponding antiparticles, specifically in the context of quarks and mesons. Participants explore various types of collisions, decay processes, and the implications of particle-antiparticle interactions.

Discussion Character

  • Exploratory
  • Technical explanation
  • Debate/contested

Main Points Raised

  • One participant questions what happens when a particle collides with its antiparticle, providing examples such as down quarks with anti-up quarks and up quarks with positrons.
  • Another participant suggests that collisions can be elastic or inelastic, emphasizing that antiparticles behave like particles under conservation laws, without any special treatment.
  • A participant notes that most mesons consist of a quark and an anti-quark, indicating a relationship between particle-antiparticle pairs.
  • Discussion includes the decay processes of charged and neutral pions, highlighting that neutral pions undergo annihilation due to their quark-antiquark composition, while charged pions do not exhibit the same annihilation process.
  • One participant points out that the decay of charged pions is rare, with a common decay mode being the transition to muons and neutrinos, rather than annihilation.
  • A claim is made that free quarks do not exist in isolation, which complicates the notion of colliding quarks directly.

Areas of Agreement / Disagreement

Participants express differing views on the nature of particle-antiparticle collisions, with some emphasizing the role of conservation laws and others focusing on specific decay processes. The discussion remains unresolved regarding the implications of these interactions.

Contextual Notes

Limitations include the complexity of particle interactions and the dependence on specific decay modes and conservation laws, which are not fully explored in the discussion.

teachmemorepls
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What will happen when a particle collide with other particles' anti-self? For example, down quark with anti-up quark , up quark with positron etc
 
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It will scatter somehow. You can think of all kinds of elastic and inelastic collisions compatible with the conservation laws. If something is not forbidden by conservation laws, it will happen with some probability. Perhaps I don't understand right your question, but there's nothing special about anti-particles. They just undergo elastic or inelastic reactions as particles.
 
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Most mesons are a combination of a quark and an anti-quark.
 
You can see this in the decay of the charged and neutral pion decays.
The decay of the neutral pion is basically a matter-antimatter annihilation process that can be seen through the decay equation:
π0 -> γ + γ
The annihilation occurs because neutral pions always have a quark and an antiquark from the same flavor.
But you can't see this annihilation process in charged pions where the flavors are different
π± -> π0 + e± + electron neutrino/antineutrino
 
Garlic said:
π± -> π0 + e± + electron neutrino/antineutrino
That is an extremely rare decay (about 10 decays in a billion). The most common decay is ##\pi^+ \to \mu^+ \nu## and ##\pi^- \to \mu^- \bar\nu## (probability of more than 99.98%).

Free quarks do not exist, you cannot "collide" quarks. You can have them in the same meson, with implications discussed above.
 
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