Why can't the W boson decay into a top quark?

  • Thread starter Thread starter jc09
  • Start date Start date
  • Tags Tags
    Quark
jc09
Messages
42
Reaction score
0
Just wondering if anyone could tell me why the W boson cannot decay into the heavier top mass.
 
Physics news on Phys.org
Because it's heavier. Energy wouldn't be conserved if light objects could decay to heavy ones.
 
If a neutrino from outer space with energy $10^20eV$ have a elastic scattering with electron...do it have higher possibility for the W-propagator to decay into top quark?
 
There is indeed a process similar to what you're describing that is present in the SM, but you shouldn't think about it as the W decaying so much as the electron-neutrino tunneling through a W into a top and whatever else would be present (bbar?).
 
Toponium is a hadron which is the bound state of a valance top quark and a valance antitop quark. Oversimplified presentations often state that top quarks don't form hadrons, because they decay to bottom quarks extremely rapidly after they are created, leaving no time to form a hadron. And, the vast majority of the time, this is true. But, the lifetime of a top quark is only an average lifetime. Sometimes it decays faster and sometimes it decays slower. In the highly improbable case that...
I'm following this paper by Kitaev on SL(2,R) representations and I'm having a problem in the normalization of the continuous eigenfunctions (eqs. (67)-(70)), which satisfy \langle f_s | f_{s'} \rangle = \int_{0}^{1} \frac{2}{(1-u)^2} f_s(u)^* f_{s'}(u) \, du. \tag{67} The singular contribution of the integral arises at the endpoint u=1 of the integral, and in the limit u \to 1, the function f_s(u) takes on the form f_s(u) \approx a_s (1-u)^{1/2 + i s} + a_s^* (1-u)^{1/2 - i s}. \tag{70}...
Back
Top