Visualizing the Mass and Width Spectrum of Unstable Particles

Abstract

Several graphical representations of the mass and width spectrum of unstable subatomic particles are presented. Such plots are useful tools for introducing students to the particle zoo and provide students an alternate way to organize conceptually what can seem like an overwhelming amount of data. In particular, such graphs highlight phenomenological features of unstable particles characteristic of different energy and time scales.

16 pages, 5 figures, accepted by Am. J. Phys., higher quality figures will appear in that publication and web address for color figures will appear shortly

References in corpus (3)

• First Measurement of Gamma(D*+) and Precision Measurement of m_D*+ - m_D0
• On the Mass and Width of the Z-boson and Other Relativistic Quasistable Particles
• Relating the Lorentzian and exponential: Fermi's approximation,the Fourier transform and causality

Cited by in corpus (1)

• Poincare Semigroup Symmetry as an Emergent Property of Unstable Systems