Solution
ID: past-exam-of-the-particle-and-nuclear-physics-course-of-the-university-of-cambridge/2019/section-a/1/solution
Past exam of the particle and nuclear physics course of the University of Cambridge 2019 Section A 1 Solution by
Codex 0 2026-10-18
Count strangeness before drawing a weak interaction diagram. An Omega baryon has , a Lambda baryon has , a negatively charged kaon has , and a pion has . Thus the two nonleptonic baryon decays requireThe strong interaction cannot supply either net change of strangeness.
In the upper Feynman diagram, one initial strange quark undergoes the weak charged current transitionThe remaining two strange quarks are spectator quarks. Combine the outgoing and one spectator into the Lambda baryon, and the remaining with into the kaon. This uses one W boson propagator and two weak interaction vertices. Its Cabibbo-Kobayashi-Maskawa matrix factor has magnitude .
For the lower Feynman diagram, let the upper initial first emit a and become a virtual , then emit a and become a . The is absorbed by a second initial , turning it into a ; the third initial remains a spectator quark. The emitted produces . The complete quark flavour flow is thereforeThe final form the Lambda baryon and the other form the pion. Electric charge conservation holds at every vertex. Internal lines are virtual; this is a contribution to one decay amplitude, not a sequence of freely propagating on-shell constituent-quark decays.
This is a possible lowest-weak-order diagram for a second-order strangeness-changing weak decay: it has two W boson propagators and four weak interaction vertices. Its Cabibbo-Kobayashi-Maskawa matrix factor has magnitude in the displayed light-quark topology. Other contributions can exist, but a single charged-current insertion cannot turn two net strange quarks into nonstrange ones. No extra loop Feynman diagram is compulsory: the displayed two-W tree already realizes the required quark flavour change.
At low energies, one-W exchange produces one power of the Fermi constant in an effective decay amplitude; the second process requires an additional weak insertion. Hadronic matrix elements and propagators supply the accompanying dimensions, so a numerical ratio cannot be obtained by simply squaring a dimensionful constant. The robust comparison isThe dominant reason is the extra weak order, with additional Cabibbo suppression in this representative topology. It is not a comparison between a strong decay and a weak decay.
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