Talk:W and Z bosons/Archive 1

Archive 1

Early text from 2001

On the page the Z boson is described as a variety of W boson. I know they both carry the weak force, but is this accurate? — Preceding unsigned comment added by Josh Grosse (talk • contribs) 02:14, 26 September 2001 (UTC)

Virtual particles

!!!! What is "In practice, they can be considered to be virtual particles."???? Come on, this is so wrong. Our detectors are far enough from the interaction point (and are slow enough) so that the W and Z are never real. The probability of measuring a W or a Z is negligible. Anyhow, the phrase above is a big physics mistake. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 24.47.41.90 (talk) 04:04, 1 September 2010 (UTC)

Talk 1

What is the antiparticles of the Z Boson? Or is it its own? I just don't know offhand what its spin is, and I'm not sure where I'd look it up - if it has non-zero spin, it must have a distinct antiparticle, as the neutron does (to the extent that the neutron is a particle, of course). Pakaran 18:13, 17 Dec 2003 (UTC)

Not quite; It has spin 1, yet it is its own antiparticle. Antiparticles have the same spin as ordinary particles. The photon is another example of a particle with non-zero spin that is its own antiparticle. The neutron is not a fundamental particle, as it is made of quarks, the quarks are charged, thus they are not their own antiparticles. The quarks give rise to properties such as a magnetic dipole moment, an electric dipole moment, and weak charge.

67.123.41.95 03:47, 4 Jan 2004 (UTC)

Differentiation

I modified the first paragraph to add information about antiparticles and the Z mass. Also to clarify that the Z is not a W.

User:Jeremy Henty 21:21, 19 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Info

I noticed a coincidence that should be mentioned somewhere, perhaps here at the discussion area: the number of known beta decays of unstable nuclei has a huge increment just when the mass of the nucleus surpasses the mass of the W boson. Here is an histogram, built from the NUDAT database: http://dftuz.unizar.es/~rivero/research/bhist.jpg 22:10, 20 июня 2004 (править) (отменить) — Preceding unsigned comment added by 155.210.68.89 (talk • contribs)

sounds like quack to me. Do you have a journal reference? 69.117.179.22 (talk) 04:03, 24 November 2009 (UTC)

Revert of signed contribution

I can understand why User:131.111.8.102 reverted the additions of User:195.96.235.201 (who is evidently one Josiph Rangelov), but they actually seemed pretty informative. Here's a cut-and-paste, in the hopes that future Wikipedians will know how to incorporate them into the article:

As you can understand, all elementary particles are built from one or two point-like elementary charges, whish together with neutral vacuum are moving in self-consistent way.As a result of this motion the neutral vacuum create vertex (with sfpherical symmetry in case of neutrino and with cylindric symmetry (discus)in case of qwarkino. When some particle transforms in onother, then its point-like electric charge must to change own motion. Therefore in this moment of time the point-like charge excicts as mediate vector boson, where the point-like charges is moving in circular oscilattions, which averaged density have form of nearly flat discuss.

The dirrection of this discus in space is always in direction of motion for one electric charge and in opposite of direction of motion for opposite electric charge. Therefore they have spin a whole number of h-bar (+1, -1) Therefore in dependence of electric charge the mediate W bosons can interacted only with neutrino or antineutrino and with right or left quarkinos in order to obtain spin value of half of h-bar. The neutral mediate bosns have two opposite electric charges which are moving along two opposite circular oscillations and therefote their wholo spin have zero value. Therefore mediate neutral Z boson may interacts by two neutrins and by left and right qwuarkinos.

There is no any relation between mediate W and Z bosons and photons, as photons is only a polarized solitary needle oscillations of neutral vacuum without electric charge. Therefore while mediate vector bozons W ana Z have mass at rest, the photons have no mass at rest. Josiph Rangelov rangelov@issp.bas.bg or rangelov@pronto.phys.bas.bg

I left a message on his talk page; I do hope he contributes further. Twiddling my thumbs expectantly, --Ardonik 08:31, Jul 21, 2004 (UTC)

He also seems to be registered as User:Rangelov@issp.bas.bg (See User talk:Rangelov@issp.bas.bg) and has made these contributions without logging in. I suspect that they could (with appropriate editing) be helpful additions but, as you say, for understandable reasons, they have mostly been reverted. Some recent amendments to electron are still there but I expect they will go soon too. -- ALoan (Talk) 11:10, 21 Jul 2004 (UTC)

These paragraphs added by User:195.96.235.201 are not just poor English, but also incorrect physics. I have not checked all the articles modified by him, but I did look at his change to the Higgs Boson, and this also made no sense. --131.111.8.102 14:12, 21 Jul 2004 (GMT)

W and Z masses

I updated the W boson mass to the 2006 PDG value: MW = 80.403 +- 0.029 GeV/c^2. I also fixed a typo in the uncertainty on the Z boson mass: MZ = 91.1876 +- 0.0021 GeV/c^2 (previous was +- 0.021). The reference for these numbers is W.-M. Yao et al., J. Phys. G 33, 1 (2006). I don't know how to add citations to journal articles yet; could someone please put this in in place of the citation needed tags? HEL 17:17, 1 October 2006 (UTC)

Origin of Z boson name?

The Z particle was semi-humorously given its name because it was said to be the last particle to need discovery. Another explanation is that the Z particle derives its name from the fact that it has zero electric charge. I've never heard either of these explanations before. Can anyone provide a reference? HEL 17:23, 1 October 2006 (UTC)

Weak isospin

How is it that an article about the weak interaction does not say anything about weak charge? The article for electromagnetism talks about electric charge, and the article for the strong interaction talks about color charge, so why is it that this article says nothing about weak isospin? And is the weak interaction SU(2) or SU(6)? That question has been bothering me for ages. If there are any experts out there, please help improve this article, and any others related to the weak interaction. God knows we need it. Thanks 69.65.219.204 (talk) 03:54, 11 March 2008 (UTC)

Apollo Mission to the Moon

I was watching a Discovery documentary on the Apollo 11 mission to the moon back in 1969, and it said that the "flashes" the astronauts observed inside their spacecraft were deemed (on return from the mission) to be z particles that striked and entered the spacecraft. But the article cites 1973 as the date for the discovery of the z articles. A little confused - any ideas? Todd (talk) 21:39, 11 March 2008 (UTC)

They weren't Z bosons, they were high-Z nuclei. See http://www.badastronomy.com/bad/tv/firstonthemoon.html Mjamja (talk) 16:44, 1 May 2008 (UTC)

Thank you Mjamja! Todd (talk) 11:32, 1 August 2008 (UTC)

W0 Bosons

I saw them at many places, and yet there is no mention of them. Why is that? Headbomb (talk) 19:30, 13 April 2008 (UTC)

W0 does not exist .. or in a way the photon is the W0 boson 69.117.179.22 (talk) 04:07, 24 November 2009 (UTC)

If they don't exist, then why are they meantioned in Neutral current? I doubt they are photons, rather I suspect they are just another name for Zs. Rwflammang (talk) 20:49, 9 March 2011 (UTC)

The W0 and the B are linear combinations of the Z and the photon. Dauto (talk) 04:24, 25 March 2011 (UTC)

W° "No longer 'exist'". They (hypothetically) 'existed' before then symmetry was broken. I would suggest you look at GUT articles, FWIW. See Z° section for an extremely terse mention.Abitslow (talk) 20:19, 6 March 2015 (UTC)

Feynman Diagram for Beta Minus decay

Shouldn't the arrow for the anti electron neutrino be pointing the other way i.e. outwards? Neil9999 (talk) 22:12, 15 May 2008 (UTC)

It's a fairly common, but not universal, convention to draw the arrows on antifermions in the "opposite" direction. Mjamja (talk) 01:35, 16 May 2008 (UTC)

Ok thanks Neil9999 (talk) 10:32, 16 May 2008 (UTC)

This is very confusing to the average reader (i.e. me). With the timescale on the left of the picture, it seems to imply that the neutrino is going backwards in time, or that the neutrino is required to start the reaction to create an electron. I don't understand why there is a convention to draw it backwards, but if it is not universal, I suggest that it is changed. 62.20.64.202 (talk) 14:20, 23 March 2011 (UTC)

No, we should stick to the convention. It seems to imply that the neutrino is traveling backwards in time because it was designed to imply just that. Antiparticles are indeed equivalent to particles traveling backwards in time. Dauto (talk) 04:32, 25 March 2011 (UTC)

Feynman drew these diagrams without any antiparticles. i.e. the antineutrino is a neutrino travelling back in time, not an antineutrino travelling back in time as the article implies (!) which is a forbidden process. -- cheers, Michael C. Price ^talk 08:09, 25 March 2011 (UTC)

The diagram does not imply this, you're just reading it with a particular convention in mind, a convention which is not universal. Here, the other convention applies (the outcome is labelled, rather than the fermion, arrows indicate the flow of fermion number). We've been over this several times now Michael. Headbomb {talk / contribs / physics / books} 13:12, 25 March 2011 (UTC)

We discussed it without agreement, remember? As I said, the diagrams are confusing, and two more readers thought and said so. But, hey, don't listen to me. Who says physics articles should clear? Let's obfuscate them up like the maths articles! -- cheers, Michael C. Price ^talk 13:31, 25 March 2011 (UTC)

This diagram is correct as it is. Arrows do not indicate direction of momentum, they indicate direction of positive lepton number. Thus the arrow and the antineutrino text label two different things: one labels particle flow, the other labels asymptotic state. I would disagree with an above comment, it's not "fairly common, but not universal." It's universal. It's common (though not usually preferred) to label the particle flow instead of the outgoing state (i.e. replace the anti-nu with a nu in the diagram), but it's incorrect to reverse the direction of the arrow. Also, it's not forbidden for antineutrinos to travel back in time: jast as you can represent an antineutrino propagating forward in time as a neutrino propagating backwards in time, you can represent a neutrino going forwards in time as an antineutrino traveling backwards. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Certain (talk • contribs) 22:26, 7 March 2012 (UTC)

W0 and B bosons

Shouldn't there be a mention of those somewhere? Headbomb {ταλκ – WP Physics: PotW} 06:24, 21 August 2008 (UTC)

There could be a point in mentioning them in the Predicting the W and Z section, where symmetry breaking is discussed anyway. It is also not apparent from this section that the U(1) symmetry of electromagnetism is not the same as the original U(1) hypercharge symmetry. --Blennow (talk) 00:33, 21 October 2008 (UTC)

Discovery

I corrected the name of the UA2 spokesperson at the time of the W and Z discoveries. The whole section could use a rewrite, for example to make it clear that Rubbia, Cline and McIntyre were the driving forces behind the push for a proton-antiproton collider, and that van der Meer was the guy behind stochastic cooling of antiprotons, add more info about the collaborations, detectors, detection methods etc.. Maybe after retirement... —Preceding unsigned comment added by 131.225.103.35 (talk) 20:03, 13 January 2011 (UTC)