Strong and Electromagnetic Decays of the New Particles

Abstract

Experimental information on decays [1–4] of the q$\bar{q}$-particles with q = c,b,t... can provide simple, direct and new tests of old-fashioned ideas such as internal symmetries, meson mixings and dominance of meson poles. It is the purpose of these lectures to work out and review [5–9,24] some of these tests and to compare them to experiment in the case of charm. For the old u-, d- and s-quarks at low energies, the simple concepts of symmetry, mixing and dominance (SYMIDO) work well and thus these new tests are of much interest. From the point of view of the old physics, this is obvious and — if these tests are successful — SYMIDO should also be of interest for the genuine QCD-type physics of the new particles. SYMIDO — in that case a consequence of hadron dynamics at low and high energies — would then be an interesting property of QCD which might be understood in the perturbative limit at high energies. In any case, SYMIDO would provide a compact description of the data.

Lectures given at the XVIII. Internationale Universitätswochen für Kernphysik Schladming, Austria, February 28 – March 10, 1979.