Spectroscopy and lifetime of bottom and charm hadrons
There are several motivations for studying masses and lifetimes of the hadrons containing a heavy quark, either the bottom or the charm quark. First, the mass and the lifetime are fundamental properties of an elementary particle. Second, the spectroscopy of hadrons gives insights into the QCD potential between quarks. In particular, a symmetry exists for heavy hadrons when the heavy quark mass is taken to be infinite, providing a powerful tool to predict and understand properties of those heavy hadrons. Third, studies of the lifetimes of heavy hadrons probe their decay mechanisms. A measurement of the lifetime, or the total decay width, is necessary when the authors extract magnitudes of elements of the Kobayashi-Maskawa matrix. Again, in the limit of an infinite heavy quark mass things become simple and decay of a heavy hadron should be the decay of the heavy quark Q. This leads to a prediction that all hadrons containing the heavy quark Q should have the same lifetime, that of the quark Q. This is far from reality in the case of charm hadrons, where the D{sup +} meson lifetime is about 2.5 times longer than the D{sup 0} meson lifetime. Perhaps the charm quark is not heavy enough. The simple quark decay picture should be a better approximation for the bottom hadrons because of the larger b quark mass. On the experimental side, the measurements and knowledge of the heavy hadrons (in particular bottom hadrons) have significantly improved over the last decade, thanks to high statistics data accumulated by various experiments. The authors shall review recent developments in these studies in the remainder of this manuscript.
- Research Organization:
- Fermi National Accelerator Lab. (FNAL), Batavia, IL (United States)
- Sponsoring Organization:
- USDOE Office of Energy Research (ER) (US)
- DOE Contract Number:
- AC02-76CH03000
- OSTI ID:
- 754851
- Report Number(s):
- FERMILAB-Conf-00/009-E; TRN: US0002391
- Resource Relation:
- Conference: 3rd International Conference on B Physics and CP Violation, Taipei (TW), 12/03/1999--12/07/1999; Other Information: PBD: 15 May 2000
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
Similar Records
Inclusive Measurements of |V(ub)| From BaBar
New results on CLEO`s heavy quarks - bottom and charm