Bottom-quark jet tagging 2026-10-24
Bottom-quark tagging identifies jets compatible with a bottom hadron, often through displaced tracks, a secondary decay vertex or a lepton within the jet. The finite hadron lifetime gives the displacement. Efficiencies and mistaken tags from charm or light jets must be calibrated; a top quark itself decays before hadronization.
Cabibbo-Kobayashi-Maskawa matrix Created 2026-09-24 Updated 2026-10-18
The Cabibbo-Kobayashi-Maskawa matrix compares the left-handed unitary matrices that diagonalize the up-type and down-type Yukawa matrices. Its rows label up quarks, charm quarks and top quarks; its columns label down quarks, strange quarks and bottom quarks. In the weak charged current, the coefficient of is . A single CKM matrix therefore connects quark masses, flavour-changing decay amplitudes, and CP violation.
Write and . An exactly unitary matrix with three mixing angles and one CP-violating phase is
This convention agrees with Makoto Kobayashi's account of three-generation quark mixing.[ref]
The Christenson-Cronin-Fitch-Turlay kaon CP violation experiment established the phenomenon that required an explanation. Makoto Kobayashi and Toshihide Maskawa showed that two-generation quark mixing cannot supply it, whereas adding a third quark generation permits an irreducible weak phase. Their 1973 paper also considered additional fields as alternative mechanisms; the three-generation conclusion concerns CP violation from the minimal unitary quark mixing mechanism.[ref]
A common weak phase makes CP violation across mesons testable through the BABAR time-dependent CP violation experiment. It does not explain the cosmic baryon asymmetry.[ref]
Charmed baryon 2026-10-13
A baryon containing a charm quark. For one charm and two up/down quarks in the spatial ground state, light-diquark spin-isospin correlation gives the isosinglet Lambda c baryon and the isotriplet Sigma c baryon families.
For and a neutral photon or Z boson, the loop runs over down-type quarks. CKM unitarity cancels a common mass-independent loop contribution. The large bottom mass relative to down and strange masses normally makes the surviving bottom contribution largest, and favours final charm. Adding a resolved photon to a final state introduces another electromagnetic coupling and three-body phase space without removing the flavour cancellation. Some diagrams use the quartic gauge vertex, so the number of vertices need not increase.
A simple isolated particle resonance model starts with a survival amplitude proportional to
Its survival probability is , giving mean rest-frame lifetime . The Fourier transform of this one-sided amplitude is proportional to ; its squared modulus gives a Lorentzian line shape. Write its normalized density as
At the density is half its peak, so its intrinsic full width at half maximum is . This is a local isolated-line approximation, extending the offset coordinate over the real line; physical production thresholds, interference and energy-dependent decay widths can require a richer quantum scattering model.
Now stipulate a centered normal distribution for the measurement response, with standard deviation . A measured coordinate has density
This convolution describes the smearing of an underlying line, with constant acceptance and no background. For a pair spectrometer the response summarizes invariant-mass resolution; for an idealized collider scan it summarizes incoming center-of-mass energy spread. These are different experimental sources of uncertainty even when the same mathematical response is useful.
Figure 1.
An arbitrary narrow line broadened by two stipulated Gaussian responses
. Original numerical convolution using a Lorentzian with intrinsic width 0.20 times an arbitrary energy scale and Gaussian standard deviations 0.40 and 1.20 times that scale. Left: densities with unit area on the whole line. Right: each profile divided by its own peak. No historical points, cross-section table or published curve were copied or fitted. Details.
Choose an arbitrary scale , intrinsic decay width and response standard deviations and . Numerical integration gives apparent full width at half maximum values of approximately and , respectively. The state and its rest-frame lifetime are identical in both cases. The normal distribution's width alone is ; adding that width to in quadrature is not an exact rule for this convolution.
For a purely illustrative , taking gives . These are invented line parameters, not J/psi meson measurements. Substituting the larger apparent width into would incorrectly shorten the inferred lifetime by nearly a factor of fifteen. An unresolved width can support an upper bound on intrinsic decay width, and consequently a lower bound on lifetime, only after the instrumental response and model assumptions have been assessed.
The discovery peak and its later interpretation answer different questions. The J/psi meson is understood as charmonium, a bound charm quark–charm antiquark system. Richter's 1976 lecture distinguishes the initial discovery from subsequent tests of competing explanations, including the related level structure and later evidence for particles carrying uncancelled charm. A narrow peak alone did not establish all these properties in 1974.[ref]
Take the quarks in the defining of flavour SU(4) and the antiquarks in . The flavour part of a meson is a quark-antiquark pair . It transforms as , so the complete four-flavour meson multiplet is
Its traceless part is the Adjoint representation , the direct four-flavour analogue of the three-flavour meson octet. The trace supplies an additional trivial representation. Thus “the mesons” can refer to the traceless multiplet or to the complete quark model tensor product; keeping both explicit avoids dropping a state.
Using solution, the SU(3) representation contents are
Directly, the upper-left block with is the old ; the three entries form , the three entries form , and is another singlet. The dimensions are . This is a classification by flavour symmetry, rather than colour or spin. The much larger charm quark mass breaks the flavour SU(4) approximation strongly; it does not change this representation counting.
A meson has quark model flavour content , so four quark flavours give sixteen flavour states in
This counts a flavour set for a specified spin and orbital assignment; it does not count every excited meson. Three quark flavours instead give the familiar nine states .
Taking the fourth quark to be the charm quark, the first nine combinations , with , are the light sector. The extra seven are in , in , and in under light-flavour . For the lowest pseudoscalar mesons, the open-charm states are the three D meson/Ds meson states and their antiparticles, and the hidden-charm state is the eta c meson. The two neutral trivial representation states can mix when the flavour symmetry is broken.
The intended limitation is the accuracy of flavour symmetry: the charm quark is much heavier than the three light quarks, so a quark mass term is far from invariant. Exact flavour would relate light and charmed states with the same spin, contrary to their large observed mass splittings. However, saying that a four-flavour quark model is never considered would be too strong: flavour is used as classification bookkeeping, with much stronger symmetry breaking than light-flavour .[ref] This is a flavour special unitary group, distinct from the three-colour gauge group of Quantum chromodynamics.
Adopt the phase convention and . Changing both phases changes the convention for the mixing parameter, not physical predictions. The flavor contents are and . A pair of charged weak currents changes strangeness by two units through the following box contractions, with summed over.
Figure 1.
Charged-current box contractions for neutral-kaon mixing; solid arrows carry quark number and wavy lines denote W bosons
. Details.
The drawing uses unitary gauge: the W boson gauge-boson propagator contains its longitudinal part. In a gauge of a renormalizable quantum field theory, charged Goldstone boson boxes must also be included to obtain the same gauge-independent result. The external lines represent the valence quarks; the meson matrix element also contains strong interaction binding effects.
Put , and . The charged weak box contribution to kaon mixing has the effective four-fermion interaction structure
Here is the Fermi constant, is the CKM matrix, and is a dimensionless loop function from a Feynman integral; the estimate suppresses convention-dependent numerical factors. Four weak interaction Feynman vertices and a one-loop Feynman integral give the coupling and loop order suppression. Unitarity of the CKM matrix gives , so the GIM mechanism cancels the mass-independent part. With a negligible up quark mass, the leading charm quark term has . Define by . Estimating the hadronic matrix element by , with the dimensionless kaon bag parameter of order unity, gives
The hadronic normalization includes division by when relativistically normalized states are converted to the effective Hamiltonian for neutral-meson mixing. Since , the Cabibbo suppression is explicit. Illustrative scales , , and give an order to estimate. The full sum includes charm quark-top quark and top quark-top quark terms, important for CP violation; long-distance strong interaction contributions prevent this dimensional estimate from being a precision prediction. A meson matrix element necessarily needs hadronic input in addition to electroweak parameters.
For the decaying kaon system write , where and are Hermitian matrices. The entries denoted in the question are entries of this effective Hamiltonian for neutral-meson mixing; they need not themselves form a Hermitian matrix. CPT invariance equates the diagonal masses and diagonal decay widths, giving
One can see why there is no complex conjugation on the right as follows. In the flavor subspace let and represent the antiunitary CPT operation by followed by complex conjugation. CPT changes a projected forward propagator into its adjoint. Indeed, if projects onto the flavor subspace and is the Hermitian microscopic generator, its invariance and the antiunitary reversal of give . In the time-independent two-state approximation, the effective generator this means , whose diagonal entries give ; the off-diagonal entries impose no further condition. Equivalently, apply CPT separately to the dispersive and absorptive Hermitian matrices. Treating the decaying effective Hamiltonian for neutral-meson mixing as a Hermitian matrix would incorrectly discard the absorptive part.
In the chosen flavor phase convention CP is represented by . Its invariance requires . Thus it gives diagonal equality and additionally
The normalized CP eigenstates are
Applying CP directly gives eigenvalues and respectively.
Now use CPT to put and take correlated square roots , . Its characteristic polynomial equation is , and direct multiplication shows
Expressing these two eigenvectors in the CP eigenstate basis gives, respectively, coefficients proportional to and . Therefore the kaon CP mixing parameter is
and, because the CP eigenstate basis is orthonormal, the normalized states at production are
The kaon mixing square-root branch convention correlates the roots continuously with the limit of conserved CP , where and . Reversing one root interchanges the two eigenstates. The labels short and long are fixed by their decay widths: their complex eigenvalues are , and subsequent evolution supplies . The displayed formula assumes nonzero mixing and , as in the physical kaon system; degenerate or defective matrices require a separate limiting treatment.
Allowed through an s-channel W boson. The initial up quark and down antiquark annihilate into a virtual , which produces the final charm quark and strange antiquark. The two weak charged current vertices contain the nonzero CKM matrix elements and , with complex conjugations determined by fermion-flow conventions.
The left panel shows the unique physical-particle tree-level Feynman diagram. A neutral exchanged gauge boson cannot connect these charged annihilation currents, and flavour-diagonal neutral vertices cannot turn an up quark into a charm quark. There is no additional elementary charged scalar in the minimal Standard Model.
Allowed through a virtual W boson. The charm quark emits a and becomes a down quark through the nonzero CKM matrix element . The virtual W boson produces a positive muon and a muon neutrino through the leptonic weak charged current. The right panel is the unique physical-particle tree-level Feynman diagram.
Its total electric charge is , equal to the initial charge, and its final lepton number is . The decay is Cabibbo suppressed, rather than forbidden. These diagram counts use unitary gauge: in covariant gauges charged unphysical Goldstone bosons can supply gauge-dependent pieces of the same physical amplitudes, not additional physical channels.
The ideal two-shower event fraction is , approximately in simple channel counting or using the measured tau lepton electronic branching fraction. The selected particle decay chain is
The electron and Positron each make a contained electromagnetic shower; muons penetrate, and generic hadrons do not deposit all their energy as a contained electromagnetic shower.
To estimate , use lepton universality and neglect final masses and Quantum chromodynamics corrections. The electronic and muonic decay widths each carry weight one. The accessible inclusive hadronic channels have weights and , where three is the color multiplicity in a decay width. The charm quark is inaccessible in physical tau lepton hadronic decays. With , the total weight is , giving
The 2021 measured value instead gives .[ref] The difference reflects effects omitted by the simple free-channel estimate, especially the hadronic contribution to the total decay width.
There are two tau leptons per produced pair and two per selected pair, so the fraction of all produced tau leptons belonging to these two-shower events is also . The unrestricted fraction of individual tau leptons decaying electronically is ; these are different selections. A real high-energy shower cut gives an additional acceptance factor: , which cannot be computed without the cut and detector response. No factor of two is needed for the unique assignment.
Use an inclusive spectator model: one heavy constituent decays through the Fermi interaction, and sum the open charged-current channels. In weak-decay channel counting, each massless final lepton pair gives basic width
A quark pair contributes three colors multiplied by its squared Cabibbo-Kobayashi-Maskawa matrix element. Do not multiply by three just because the initial quark has three colors: its lifetime is the width of one initial state, averaged over initial color when appropriate. Define
For the tau lepton, two leptonic channels contain an electron or a muon; light hadronic channels have or . Therefore
No charmed hadron can be produced: the lightest charmed meson exceeds the tau mass. [ref] The supplied charm-quark parameter is not a free asymptotic final-particle mass. The leading count neglects electron and muon masses and light hadronic threshold effects.
For the charm quark, and dominate. The emitted current has two light leptonic channels and the same light hadronic channels as above; a tau cannot be produced:
For the bottom quark, retain with the supplied and neglect the much smaller channel. The emitted current can produce three lepton flavors and two up-type quark families, with three colors for each family. In particular is open at the given masses, although suppressed by phase space. Counting each open channel as massless gives
Setting Cabibbo sums to one recovers the familiar counts , and . Despite its larger mass, the bottom quark is slowed by its small interfamily mixing factor.
These are leading estimates rather than precise lifetimes of free quarks. confinement makes charm and bottom observable in hadrons, whose lifetimes involve spectator interactions, Quantum chromodynamics corrections and bound-state effects. mass corrections are significant for bottom: even the single-charm channel with massless leptons has the three-body weak-decay mass correction
Tau and double-charm channels have different suppressions, so multiplying the entire width by this one factor is inconsistent. Accurate hadron lifetimes require those channel-dependent factors and hadronic dynamics; the exercise supports the explicitly stated leading counts.
TODO: the numerical resonance-area reading is unavailable from the retained source. Page 6 retains the upper data panels but loses the lower part of the scanned data image, including the numerical horizontal energy calibration. A vertical cross section scale and an apparent peak cannot supply without that calibration. The decoded image contains 2,834,898 of 4,437,216 required RGB bytes; the archived bundle has the same truncation. No horizontal scale or natural decay width is inferred from the display width.
The recoverable numerical conversion is nevertheless definite. With , , , and , b gives
This coefficient assumes the plotted exclusive electronic sample has not already been corrected for acceptance. A restored area, with continuum subtraction and acceptance convention checked, would complete the estimate. A tabulated modern J/psi meson width would be external information rather than a reading of these data.
The narrow scattering resonance indicates suppressed strong interaction decay. In the quark model, is below the open-charm quark threshold, so its constituents cannot simply emerge in separate charmed mesons. The OZI rule suppresses annihilation into light hadrons; for a color-singlet state the leading purely gluonic channel needs three gluons. The observed leptonic channels remain competitive. Its mass and fit charmonium; the small width alone would not uniquely identify the new quark flavour without the wider spectrum and threshold evidence.
Use the explicit charged channels and , labeling the two positive pions as 1,2 and the negative one as 3. With , the opposite-charge pair mass squares have the ranges
Their exact correlated boundaries follow by taking the pair rest-frame angle to its endpoints. For general daughter masses, define . At fixed ,
The charged-pion thresholds give the following numerical comparison:
Parent | | Allowed single-axis interval, | Dalitz area, \ | | to | approximately \ | | to | approximately
The area is about times smaller for the kaon. Including the phase-space prefactor, its integrated labelled three-body phase space is about times smaller; neither comparison predicts a ratio of weak decay widths without the matrix elements.
A intermediate state produces horizontal or vertical bands near or in the charm decay. Scalar pion-pair amplitudes, including broad low-mass -wave contributions and accessible , can also populate the plot. The kaon pair mass cannot exceed , so it cannot contain an on-shell or band; smooth nonresonant and rescattering effects remain possible. Channels containing neutral pions use their supplied mass and shift these boundaries slightly without changing the conclusion. The figure shows kinematic domains and representative accessible bands, not an assumed measured intensity.
Figure 1.
Calculated charged-three-pion Dalitz domains and accessible resonance bands
. Details.
The literal final state has a three-vertex loop using the Standard Model quartic vertex . The two other vertices are and , with . The internal down-type quark joins those two vertices, while two charged-vector propagators join them through the quartic vertex emitting both neutral bosons. The bottom panel of the figure shows this topology, satisfying the three-vertex hint without dropping the photon. Its additional electromagnetic coupling is contained in the four-leg vertex; counting vertices alone does not determine coupling order.
The companion single- penguin diagram illustrates : it instead attaches the neutral boson to the internal quark line and has three cubic vertices. These are different final states. A complete gauge-invariant amplitude requires all companion attachments; for these include photon radiation from charged lines as well as the quartic graph.
Both flavour sums have the form
where the loop function also depends on the final-state kinematics. After cancellation of a mass-independent part by GIM mechanism, the bottom-quark mass gives the largest surviving contribution: , while is not unusually small compared with the strange combination. The larger than then favours final charm. Schematically,
The same flavour preference applies to the separate two-body modes and . This estimates a relative flavour preference, not an absolute branching ratio. Loop factors and mass-difference suppression remain, so these channels are fully compatible with GIM. A resolved extra photon also introduces another electromagnetic coupling and three-body phase space; an experimental definition needs photon-energy and isolation cuts to distinguish hard radiation from the soft limit.
Away from narrow resonances and quark thresholds, the QED annihilation cross section into each accessible quark flavour is its squared fractional electric charge times the muon-pair cross section, multiplied by the number of distinguishable color charges. Thus the inclusive hadronic ratio is
With , the continuum predictions are , and as successive charm quark and bottom quark channels become accessible. The measured normalization and steps support three color charges. At leading order these hadronic events form two back-to-back jets from the quark and antiquark; quantitative comparisons include QCD corrections and avoid the nonperturbative threshold region.
The extra resolved jet is explained by , with gluon radiation from either the quark or antiquark. One possible color charge routing is initial followed by ; the final , and combine to a net colour singlet.
Figure 1.
Colour flow in a three-jet process and in gluon-fusion Higgs production
. Details.
The three-jet cross section contains one additional strong interaction vertex in the amplitude, so its ratio to the two-jet rate is of order times a resolution-dependent kinematic coefficient. A resolved fraction of order is consistent with perturbative QCD and a strong coupling constant much larger than the fine-structure constant. It is not an equality : the jet definition and cuts are needed. Photon radiation has a much smaller electromagnetic rate. The large hadronic third-jet rate supports gluon radiation; identifying the radiated object specifically as a colour-octet gluon also uses the QCD vertex and colour-flow description, not merely the existence of three visible jets.
Section 15.3 discusses mesons; section 15.5.2, printed p. 19, explains that adding the charm quark gives flavour , which is strongly broken by the large charm quark mass but remains useful for classification. This supports distinguishing an approximate flavour symmetry from the existence of a four-flavour quark model.
Sigma c baryon 2026-10-14
The symmetric light pairs with one charm quark give isospin one and charges . Their light spin is one; coupling the charm spin gives the Sigma c baryon triplet and excited-spin triplet conventionally marked by a star.