Abstract
Quarks and leptons are equally affected by the weak interaction. At the beginning of this chapter we first present the properties of the three charged leptons and the associated neutrinos followed by a discussion of the various types of weak interactions: leptonic, semileptonic and non-leptonic processes. These are mediated by the exchange of the heavy W± and bosons. The coupling strength of the weak interaction is determined from muon decay. The CKM matrix is introduced, whose matrix elements quantify transitions from one quark flavour to another. The weak interaction violates parity conservation. Examples presented are the muon decay and the helicity suppressed pion decay. Finally, we present charged-current deep-inelastic scattering with beams of neutrinos and antineutrinos and of polarised electrons and positrons.
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Notes
- 1.
The absorption of neutrinos by the atomic nuclei is neglected here. This is a reasonable approximation for neutrino energies less than 1 MeV, but would need to be modified for higher energies.
- 2.
The appearance of further hadronic decay channels will be treated in the next section.
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Povh, B., Rith, K., Scholz, C., Zetsche, F., Rodejohann, W. (2015). Phenomenology of the Weak Interaction. In: Particles and Nuclei. Graduate Texts in Physics. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-46321-5_10
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-46321-5_10
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
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