Where does the energy of a destroyed W boson go?

[Macocio]

Hello.

I'm new so I am uncertain to which forum this post should be posted in so I'll just leave this here.

Anyways, I was reading about the four fundamental forces and it came to my mind that the W boson is 80.4 GeV, whilst the two lepton that are excreted upon destruction are 0.511 MeV (Electron) and 2.4 eV (The corresponding neutrino). So where does the 80.3994889976 GeV go when W is destroyed and excretes these two particle? Kinetic Energy?

I also noticed that a W boson excreted by another generation of fermion seems to also cause the boson to excrete another generation of leptons, why is this?

 

[Dickfore]

The W boson is "excreted" in a reaction of the following type:

u -> d + W

Is this reaction exoenergetic or endoenergetic?

 

[jtbell]

the two lepton that are excreted

A friendly linguistic tip: in English we usually say "emitted" or "released" in this context.

"Excrete" is usually used to describe a certain body function that most people do about once per day.

 

[Macocio]

The W boson is "excreted" in a reaction of the following type:

u -> d + W

Is this reaction exoenergetic or endoenergetic?

I do think that it is exoenergetic since the build up of a radioactive atom needs an external source of energy to create such an atom in the first place. The energy is stored in the build up of the atom so you might also consider it endoenergetic.

A friendly linguistic tip: in English we usually say "emitted" or "released" in this context.

"Excrete" is usually used to describe a certain body function that most people do about once per day.

I knew that, only excrete came to my mind. xD But I guess you know what I mean.

 

[kaksmet]

Hello.
So where does the 80.3994889976 GeV go when W is destroyed and excretes these two particle? Kinetic Energy?

Yes.

 

[genneth]

Also, often the W and Z bosons are virtual, so you don't really need that much energy lying around to use them.

In fact, weak interactions have roughly the same fundamental strength as electromagnetism. The reason it is "weak" at everyday scales is that W and Z require so much energy to create, that processes involving them are extremely virtual, meaning that they are heavily suppressed due to the "borrowing" of energy.