Solution

ID: past-exam-of-the-particle-and-nuclear-physics-course-of-the-university-of-cambridge/2021/section-b/5/d/solution

The charged pion has valence content . Its constituents annihilate into a virtual W boson, followed by the lepton pair:
Figure 1.
The leading quark-level charged-pion leptonic decay diagram
. Details.
The quark vertex carries the -- Cabibbo-Kobayashi-Maskawa matrix element, and the leptonic vertex is the weak charged current. The pion's nonperturbative spatial structure is encoded in the pion decay constant when evaluating the decay amplitude.

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