Solution

ID: past-exam-of-the-particle-and-nuclear-physics-course-of-the-university-of-cambridge/2015/paper-1/3/solution

In the Breit-Wigner resonance cross section, is the total centre-of-momentum energy, the resonance energy, and either incident particle's center-of-momentum momentum magnitude. The total decay width is , while and are partial widths into the entrance and specified exit channels. Their ratios to are the corresponding branching fractions. The factor averages over incident spin states and sums over the resonance's magnetic substates.
In natural units, , the resonant partial-wave cross-sectional scale is an area proportional to the squared reduced de Broglie wavelength, . Equivalently a partial-wave scattering amplitude carries one factor , and its squared modulus supplies . In SI area units the same scale is ; if is expressed in energy units, multiply the final inverse-energy-squared answer by .
For unpolarized spin-half incident muons, the unpolarized resonance spin factor is
Hence and . The outgoing tau spins do not supply another independent multiplicity here: their allowed final states are already included in .
Near a narrow resonance, treat the smooth prefactor and the partial widths as constant across the line. At the peak the denominator is . Half its height occurs when , namely at . Thus the full width at half maximum is within the Breit-Wigner narrow-line approximation. A varying prefactor or convolution with the beam-energy distribution can modify an observed line shape.
Figure 1.
Tree production and decay, fermion triangles, and the W-loop topologies for Higgs diphoton decay
. Details.
The production amplitude has a muon pair joined to a Higgs propagator through their Yukawa coupling, followed by the bottom-quark pair at a second Yukawa vertex. The separate graph is a tree-level Higgs–fermion vertex. There are no tree-level or vertices in the renormalizable Standard Model: their lowest nonzero graphs are loops. A quark triangle, dominated by the top contribution, produces two gluons. Charged-fermion triangles contribute to two photons; charged-W loops also contribute and are dominant in the Standard Model amplitude. Photon permutations and the W contact topology belong to the full amplitude; the diagram shows these topologies rather than claiming one triangle alone is the entire gauge-invariant W contribution.[ref]

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