Details
The X and Y bosons couple quarks to leptons, allowing violation of the conservation of baryon number and thus permitting proton decay.
An X boson would have the following decay modes:
- X → u + u
- X → e+ + d
where the two decay products in each process have opposite chirality, u is an up quark, d is a down quark and e+ is a positron.
A Y boson would have the following decay modes:
- Y → e+ + u
- Y → d + u
- Y → d + ν
e
where the first decay product in each process has left-handed chirality and the second has right-handed chirality and ν
e is an electron antineutrino.
Similar decay products exist for the other quark-lepton generations
In these reactions, neither the lepton number (L) nor the baryon number (B) is conserved, but B − L is. Different branching ratios between the X boson and its antiparticle (as is the case with the K-meson) would explain baryogenesis.
Read more about this topic: X And Y Bosons
Famous quotes containing the word details:
“There was a time when the average reader read a novel simply for the moral he could get out of it, and however naïve that may have been, it was a good deal less naïve than some of the limited objectives he has now. Today novels are considered to be entirely concerned with the social or economic or psychological forces that they will by necessity exhibit, or with those details of daily life that are for the good novelist only means to some deeper end.”
—Flannery O’Connor (1925–1964)