Forbidden by electric-charge conservation. The initial bottom quark has electric charge , while the displayed final electric charges sum to . Therefore no Standard Model Feynman diagram, at tree level or any loop order, can realize this channel.
This is an intentionally disallowed process, not a transcription correction. The charge-conserving semileptonic bottom decay instead has an Electron and an antineutrino of Electron flavour, while a Positron accompanies the conjugate antiquark decay. Replacing the displayed particles silently would change the requested classification.
Past exam of the mathematics course of the University of Cambridge 2018 iii Paper 305 3 a Solution Created 2026-10-03 Updated 2026-10-05
A leading short-distance Standard Model contribution to neutral D-meson mixing is a box Feynman diagram with two W bosons and two internal down-type quark lines:
The incoming pair becomes ; the internal labels run over the down quark, strange quark and bottom quark. Each corner is a weak charged current vertex. Four such vertices make the contribution of order . Summing the internal flavours produces Cabibbo-Kobayashi-Maskawa matrix factors and the Glashow-Iliopoulos-Maiani mechanism: the flavour-independent term cancels by . This box Feynman diagram is one contribution; long-distance intermediate hadron states can also contribute to neutral D-meson mixing.
