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Allowed through a t-channel W boson. Along one fermion line the up quark becomes a down quark by emitting a virtual $W^{+}$; along the other the charm antiquark absorbs it and becomes a strange antiquark. The middle panel shows this weak charged current exchange. Both electric charge and baryon number are conserved at each vertex, and the relevant CKM matrix entries are nonzero.

This is the unique physical-particle tree-level Feynman diagram. A neutral exchange would require a flavor-changing neutral current on each line, absent at tree level in the Standard Model. An annihilation into a neutral boson would likewise require an off-diagonal up-type neutral current. The different generations do not forbid the charged-current graph.

Allowed through an s-channel W boson. The initial up quark and down antiquark annihilate into a virtual $W^{+}$, which produces the final charm quark and strange antiquark. The two weak charged current vertices contain the nonzero CKM matrix elements $V_{ud}$ and $V_{cs}$, 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.

The strange quark $s$ is the second-generation down-type quark, with electric charge $-e/3$, spin $1/2$, baryon number $1/3$ and strangeness $-1$. Its strange antiquark has the opposite additive quantum numbers.^[ref]

The strong interaction can create a strange–antistrange pair without changing total strangeness. A later weak interaction can change net strangeness, allowing a strange hadron to decay into nonstrange products. This separation of production and decay mechanisms makes the strangeness label useful in reconstructing particle reactions. Its sign is a convention for the flavor quantum number, rather than the sign of an additional physical electric charge.