Can a muon decay into an electron and a photon?

Can a muon decay into an electron and a photon?

Muons decay predominantly into an electron 1 and a pair of neutrinos, μ + → e + ν ¯ μ ν e , with photons possibly irradiated by one of the charged particles involved in the process.

Can a muon turn into an electron?

However, a particle has rest energy equal to its mass, but now there’s now way a muon at rest can pass on all of its energy to an electron at rest.

What does a muon decay into?

Muons are unstable and decay into their lighter counterparts, electrons, in about 2.2 microseconds. Nonelementary, or composite, particles can also change and emit neutrinos.

Why do muons decay into electrons?

The reason muons (and taus) decay while electrons do not decay is that there is no charged particle that is lighter than an electron. The muon is about 200 times heavier than an electron and by the rules of the weak nuclear force the muon can decay into electron and 2 neutrinos.

What is the combination of electron and muon?

Like the electron and the muon, the tau has its associated neutrino. The tau can decay into a muon, plus a tau-neutrino and a muon-antineutrino; or it can decay directly into an electron, plus a tau-neutrino and an electron-antineutrino. Because the tau is heavy, it can also decay into particles containing quarks.

What is the difference between an electron and a muon?

Muons are about 200 times heavier than electrons; muons are about 100 MeV, whereas electrons are about 0.5 MeV. It follows that whereas an electron is stopped in the ECAL, a muon just ploughs through it and into the muon chamber, as illustrated by this cartoon from this blog post about the muon.

What is a muon made of?

Muons have the same negative charge as electrons but 200 times the mass. They are made when high-energy particles called cosmic rays slam into atoms in Earth’s atmosphere. Travelling at close to the speed of light, muons shower Earth from all angles.

What type of particle is a muon?

The muon is one of the fundamental subatomic particles, the most basic building blocks of the universe as described in the Standard Model of particle physics. Muons are similar to electrons but weigh more than 207 times as much.

Are muons mesons?

Formerly, muons were called “mu mesons”, but are not classified as mesons by modern particle physicists (see § History), and that name is no longer used by the physics community. Because muons have a greater mass and energy than the decay energy of radioactivity, they are not produced by radioactive decay.

What are muons and Taus?

tau, elementary subatomic particle similar to the electron but 3,477 times heavier. Like the electron and the muon, the tau is an electrically charged member of the lepton family of subatomic particles; the tau is negatively charged, while its antiparticle is positively charged.

How is a muon different from a electron?

Muons are about 200 times heavier than the electron. While this larger mass makes them interesting, it also makes them unstable. Whereas electrons live forever, muons exist for only about two microseconds—or two millionths of a second—before they decay.

How many particles are produced in muon decay?

Muon decay almost always produces at least three particles, which must include an electron of the same charge as the muon and two types of neutrinos . Like all elementary particles, the muon has a corresponding antiparticle of opposite charge (+1 e) but equal mass and spin: the antimuon (also called a positive muon ).

Can a charged pion decay into a muon and a neutrino?

One might expect that if a charged pion can decay into a muon and a neutrino, then it should also go into an electron and a neutrino. In fact, the latter should dominate since there’s much more phase space. However, the matrix element requires a virtual W boson exchange and thus depends on an [axial] vector current.

What happens to a muon in the presence of a heavy atom?

In this bite, we’ll focus on the decay of a muon to an electron in the presence of a heavy atom. Muons conversion into an electron in the presence of an atom, aluminum. The muon is a heavy version of the electron.There are a few properties that make muons nice systems for precision measurements: They’re easy to produce .

What is the difference between a muon and an electron?

All particle detectors in collider physics experiments are built the way they are because of this simple difference: dense layers of material are used to detect electrons, while muons may be picked up downstream, where no other particles make it. So how does a muon decay?