Phi Meson

In particle physics, the phi meson or meson is a vector meson formed of a strange quark and a strange antiquark. It was the meson's unexpected propensity to decay into and that led to the discovery of the OZI rule. It has a mass of and a mean lifetime of

Properties

The most common decay modes of the meson are at , + at , and various indistinguishable mixed combinations of rho mesons and pions at . In all cases, it decays via the strong force. The pion channel would naïvely be the dominant decay channel because the collective mass of the pions is smaller than that of the kaons, making it energetically favorable; however, that decay route is suppressed by the OZI rule.

Technically, the quark composition of the meson can be thought of as a mix between , , and states, but it is very nearly a pure state. This can be shown by deconstructing the wave function of the into its component parts. We see that the and mesons are mixtures of the SU(3) wave functions as follows.
: $\phi = \psi_8\ \cos\theta\ -\ \psi_1\ \sin\theta$,
: $\omega = \psi_8\ \sin\theta\ +\ \psi_1\ \cos\theta$,

where
: $\theta$ is the nonet mixing angle,
: $\psi_8 = \frac~$ and
: $\psi_1 = \frac ~.$

The mixing angle at which the components decouple completely can be calculated to be $\ \arctan\frac \approx 35.3^\circ ~.$ The mixing angle of the and states is calculated from the masses of each state to be about 35˚, which is very close to maximum decoupling. Therefore, the meson is nearly a pure state.

History

The existence of the meson was first proposed by the Japanese American particle physicist, J. J. Sakurai, in 1962 as a resonance state between the and the . It was discovered later by in a 20 inch hydrogen bubble chamber at the Alternating Gradient Synchrotron (AGS) in Brookhaven National Laboratory in Upton, NY while they were studying collisions at approximately 2.23 GeV/. In essence, the reaction involved a beam of s being accelerated to high energies to collide with protons.

The meson has several possible decay modes. The most energetically favored mode involves the meson decaying into three pions, which is what would naïvely be expected. However, we instead observe that it decays most frequently into two kaons. Between 1963 and 1966, three people, Susumu Okubo, George Zweig, and Jugoro Iizuka, each independently proposed a rule to account for the observed suppression of the three pion decay. This rule is now known as the OZI rule and is also the currently accepted explanation for the unusually long lifetimes of the and mesons. Namely, on average they last and respectively. This is compared to the normal mean lifetime of a meson decaying via the strong force, which is on the order of

In 1999, a factory named DAFNE (or DANE since the F stands for " Factory") began operation to study the decay of the meson in Frascati, Italy. It produces mesons via electron-positron collisions. It has numerous detectors, including the KLOE detector which was in operation at the beginning of its operation.

See also

* Charmonium
* List of mesons
* List of particles
* Quark model

References

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Mesons
Onia
Strange quark
Subatomic particles with spin 1