Mesons
MESONS ARE A TYPE OF HADRON
Mesons
- Mesons interact with baryons via the strong force. They are unstable and we see lots of them in particle collisions.
Pions
- Pions are the lightest of the mesons and have a rest mass energy of about 140MeV
- Charged Pions decay into leptons and neutral pions typically decay into gamma photons
- There are anti-particle versions of each pion and pions can be charged or neutral
- Pions are the exchange particle for the strong nuclear force
- \(\pi\)
Kaons
- These are much heavier and more unstable, so they have a very short life.
- They have a rest mass energy at just under 500 MeV.
- Kaons decay into pions!
- Kaons are also Strange Particles!