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The Leptons After 100 Years Martin L The Leptons After 100 Years Martin L. Perl Citation: Physics Today 50, 10, 34 (1997); doi: 10.1063/1.881960 View online: https://doi.org/10.1063/1.881960 View Table of Contents: http://physicstoday.scitation.org/toc/pto/50/10 Published by the American Institute of Physics Articles you may be interested in Are There Really Electrons? Experiment and Reality Physics Today 50, 26 (1997); 10.1063/1.881975 When the Electron Falls Apart Physics Today 50, 42 (1997); 10.1063/1.881959 Special Issue: The Ubiquitous Electron Physics Today 50, 25 (1997); 10.1063/1.881961 Reading and Writing with Electron Beams Physics Today 50, 56 (1997); 10.1063/1.881964 On Some Modern Uses of the Electron in Logic and Memory Physics Today 50, 50 (1997); 10.1063/1.881963 Marietta Blau: Between Nazis and Nuclei Physics Today 50, 42 (1997); 10.1063/1.881996 THE LEPTONS AFTER 100 YEARS ver the course of a cen- Puzzles and mysteries abound: Are there in complicated particles such Otury, six leptons have as protons and TT mesons; the been discovered in the uni- more than just the six leptons already proton contains three quarks, verse of elementary particles. known; what is the intrinsic difference the ir meson contains one Three—the electron, muon quark and one antiquark. and tau—each have one unit between the electron, the muon and the We have never succeeded in of electric charge; the other tau; do neutrinos have mass? making or finding a single three—the neutrinos—have quark isolated by itself. no charge. Conversely, leptons, free of the Borrowing from Charles Martin L. Perl strong force, can be isolated Dickens, it can be said of the and studied individually. leptons that they are the best In thinking about defin- of particles, they are the worst of particles. ing the leptons, it is useful to remember that they are not The leptons are the best of the elementary particles force-carrying particles. This property separates them not because, being free of the complicated strong force, they only from the gluon and the photon, but also from the W can be isolated (figure 1), allowing many of their properties and Z particles that carry the weak force, and from the to be measured directly. Also, being free of the strong theorized graviton that is supposed to carry the gravita- force, they provide simple probes into atomic, nuclear and tional force. particle physics. But the leptons are also the worst of the elementary Lepton flavor conservation and neutrinos particles, for we do not know if their external simplicity The three charged leptons are distinguished from each hides important and intricate secrets. For example, after other not only by their very different masses (table 2 on many careful and clever experiments, we still do not know page 39), but also by a mysterious, at least to me, property the masses of any of the neutral leptons, the neutrinos. called lepton flavor. A student first learning about the We do not even know if the neutrino masses are zero or charged leptons would reasonably expect that the heavier not zero. muon and tau would decay through the electromagnetic The elementary particles in general are the smallest interaction: pieces of matter that we have been able to find. They are less than 10~16 meters in extent and perhaps have no detectable size.1 All the known elementary particles fall T1 -> e* + y (1) into two very general types. One type, consisting of the leptons and the quarks, is made up of spin-1/^ particles that obey Fermi-Dirac statistics and hence are called where y is a photon. Why not? The mass differences fermions. The other type consists of the bosons, which provide plenty of energy for the decay, the charge is have integral spin such as 0 or 1 and obey Bose—Einstein balanced and angular momentum can be balanced because statistics. The bosons are force-carrying particles. For the leptons have spin V2 and the photon has spin 1. But example, the gluon, spin 0, carries the strong force, and none of these decays has ever been seen! the photon, spin 1, carries the electromagnetic force. The measured upper limit on the probability of the /A -> ey decay is less than 10~10 compared to the observed I begin this review with one of the good aspects of decay of the /u, (equation 2 below). The analogous upper limit the leptons, the simplicity with which they can be defined. 5 There are four known basic forces: electromagnetic, weak, for the probability of the T decays in equation 1 is 10~ . gravitational and strong.1 The leptons are acted upon by The nonobservation of the decays in equation 1 is the electromagnetic and weak forces in a well-understood explained by a rule that assigns a different type or flavor way described by electroweak theory. (See table 1 on page to each of the charged leptons and then states that, in a 36.) We usually assume that the leptons are acted upon reaction involving leptons, it is either very difficult or even by the gravitational force, as has been demonstrated for impossible for the lepton flavor to change. Briefly, the the electron, but not for the muon or tau. And although rule says that lepton flavor is conserved. But we have we have no experimental evidence for the action of gravity no understanding of the nature of lepton flavor or of how on the neutrinos, many models for the evolution and strictly it is conserved. Indeed it was wrong for me to structure of the universe assume both nonzero mass and use the word "explained" in the first sentence of this conventional gravitational interaction for neutrinos. No- paragraph; what we have here is a codifying of observa- tice that I have written "assume": Even defining the tions, not an explanation. In spite of lepton flavor conservation, the muon and leptons entails assuming an answer to some of their 6 secrets. tau do manage to decay with lifetimes of 2 x 10~ seconds and 3 x 10~13 seconds, respectively. They decay through Leptons do not interact through the strong force, and the weak interaction, with neutrinos preserving the lepton this property decisively separates them from quarks. The flavor conservation. Consider the negative muon. Its strong force between quarks compels them to be buried principal decay mode is lX~ —> e~ + v + v^, MARTIN PERL is a professor of physics at the Stanford Linear 1 Accelerator Center in Stanford, California. where vx is a neutrino and v~2 is an antineutrino. Specifi- cally, the vl is given the same flavor as the ixr and is 34 OCTOBER 1997 PHYSICS TODAY J2L1S97 Ammcjii JustiuM* of Physics, S-0031-9228-9710-030-8 FIGURE 1. LIGHTNING, the most dramatic display of leptons. Unlike quarks, which are subject to the strong force, leptons are easily separated from other particles, as happens here naturally. Their isolatability makes their properties relatively easy to study. (Photograph by Ian Symonds.) denoted vM for muon neutrino. Thus, muon flavor is with hadrons. At high energies, when a v^ collides with conserved by being transferred from the /x" to the vM. And a proton p, we observe the creation of the e~ is compensated by the creation of an antielectron neutrino % with antielectron flavor. Thus, v^ + p —> vM + hadrons the decay is and IX- -» e~ + vM + %. (2) V + M P —> V-~ + hadrons. Similarly, the T" decays about 20% of the time through But we have never observed each of the analogous processes v^ + p —>ve + hadrons T e + vT fl +VT or v^ + p —> e~ + hadrons. The remaining 60% of the time, the T~ decays into a tau neutrino, vT, and hadrons. Hadrons have zero lepton flavor. Examples are Neutrino masses and frustration The masses of the charged leptons are well known (table T" —> VT + 77" 2), although we have absolutely no understanding of why + T~ —» VT 7T~ TT the ix mass is about 200 times the e mass and the T mass is about 17 times the /x mass. We have measured only There are other observed and nonobserved interactions of upper limits for the neutrino masses (figure 2 and table the charged leptons that fit together with the nonobser- 2). Therefore, at present the neutrinos are distinguished vation of the decays in equation 1. For example, the from each other only by their associated charged lepton. reactions The upper limits come from the limited precision of the e+ + e~ -> /x+ + /x" technology of the experiments used to measure the neu- + e + e~ —> T+ + T" trino mass. (See box 1 on page 36.) Unfortunately, in all three cases the limited measurement precision of the energy are well known, and the second one is the way in which and momentum of the particles, combined with other experi- we produce tau's to study their properties. But reactions mental problems, has defeated the experimenter. It is very such as frustrating. e+ + e" x+ + e~ Individuals outside elementary particle physics may e+ + e~ justifiably wonder at our concern about neutrino masses. So what if the neutrinos have masses much smaller than have never been observed. their associated charged leptons? Most particle physicists Thus, each of the three known neutrinos is associated see two problems. First, suppose the neutrinos have zero with a specific charged lepton (summarized in table 2). mass like the photon. The photon's zero mass is related This association dominates the interaction of the leptons to a basic invariance property of the electromagnetic field. OCTOBER 1997 PHYSICS TODAY 35 Similarly a zero mass for the neutrinos should signify Table 1.
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