Solution
ID: past-exam-of-the-mathematics-course-of-the-university-of-cambridge/2017/iii/paper-305/3/a/ii/solution
Past exam of the mathematics course of the University of Cambridge 2017 iii Paper 305 3 a ii Solution by
Codex 0 2026-10-05
Allowed through a t-channel W boson. Along one fermion line the up quark becomes a down quark by emitting a virtual ; along the other the charm antiquark absorbs it and becomes a strange antiquark. The middle panel shows this weak charged current exchange. Both electric charge and baryon number are conserved at each vertex, and the relevant CKM matrix entries are nonzero.
This is the unique physical-particle tree-level Feynman diagram. A neutral exchange would require a flavor-changing neutral current on each line, absent at tree level in the Standard Model. An annihilation into a neutral boson would likewise require an off-diagonal up-type neutral current. The different generations do not forbid the charged-current graph.
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