nLab leptonic decay

Idea

In the context of quantum hadrodynamics, the decay-mode of a meson via the weak interaction (i.e. by exchange of a W-boson or Z-boson) into a pair of leptons is called (shown are Feynman diagrams of example decays of kaons):

• a purely leptonic decay or fully leptonic decay (see also: vector meson dominance) if, besides the dilepton, no further particle is among the decay products:

• a semileptonic decay if, in addition to the dilepton, another meson is produced (see also: semileptonic Dalitz decay):

• a radiative leptonic decay if, in addition to the dilepton, a photon results (see also radiative Dalitz decay):

All this is in contrast to

• non-leptonic decays where other mesons but no leptons are produced:

Related concepts

• Dalitz decay

• flavour anomaly

• leptonic conversion decay: Landsberg 85, (3.3)

References

General

• L. G. Landsberg, Electromagnetic decays of light mesons, Physics Reports Volume 128, Issue 6, November 1985, Pages 301-376 (doi:10.1016/0370-1573(85)90129-2)

• R. Casalbuoni, A. Deandrea, N. Di Bartolomeo, F. Feruglio, R. Gatto, G. Nardulli, Phenomenology of Heavy Meson Chiral Lagrangians, Phys. Rept. 281:145-238, 1997 (arXiv:hep-ph/9605342)

Purely leptonic decays

• Tome Anticic, Purely leptonic decays of heavy flavor mesons 1997 (spire:454066)

Leptonic decays of pions

Discussion of leptonic decays of pions:

General

• Dinko Pocanic, Emil Frlez, Andries van der Schaaf, Experimental study of rare charged pion decays, Journal of Physics G: Nuclear and Particle Physics, Volume 41, Number 11 (arXiv:1407.2865)

Purely leptonic decays

See at vector meson dominance.

• G. Piller, Wolfram Weise, Vector meson dominance: Selected topics 1990 (spire310958, pdf)

Raditive leptonic decays

Discussion of radiative leptonic decays of the pion (see also at Dalitz decay)

• Rene Unterdorfer, Hannes Pichl, On the Radiative Pion Decay, Eur. Phys. J. C55:273-283, 2008 (arXiv:0801.2482)

• V. Bolotov, The radiative pion decays (pdf)

Leptonic decays of $\omega$-mesons

Discussion of leptonic decays of omega-mesons:

• I. N. Mishustin, L. M. Satarov, H. Stoecker, W. Greiner, Dilepton production by bremsstrahlung of meson fields in nuclear collisions, Phys. Rev. C57:2552-2558, 1998 (arXiv:hep-ph/9709384)

• Anastasiya Kuzmenko et al. , The Study of the Conversion Decays of Omega Meson to $\pi^0$ Meson and $e^+ e^-$ Pair with the CMD-3 Detector, CERN Proceedings Archives Vol 1 (2017) (doi:10.23727/CERN-Proceedings-2017-001.91

Leptonic decays of B-mesons

Discussion of leptonic decays of B-mesons:

General

• Patrick Koppenburg, Zdenek Dolezal, Maria Smizanska, Rare decays of b hadrons, Scholarpedia, 11(6):32643 (doi:10.4249/scholarpedia.32643)

• Brambilla et al., Section 4.2 of: QCD and strongly coupled gauge theories - challenges and perspectives, Eur Phys J C Part Fields. 2014; 74(10): 2981 (arXiv:1404.3723, doi:10.1140/epjc/s10052-014-2981-5)

• Jochen Dingfelder, Thomas Mannel, Leptonic and semileptonic decays of $B$ mesons, Rev. Mod. Phys. 88 (2016) 3, 035008 (spire:1488176, doi:10.1103/RevModPhys.88.035008)

• Giovanni Banelli, Robert Fleischer, Ruben Jaarsma, Gilberto Tetlalmatzi-Xolocotzi, Decoding (Pseudo)-Scalar Operators in Leptonic and Semileptonic B Decays, The European Physical Journal C volume 78 (arXiv:1809.09051)

Fully leptonic decays

• M. Lattery, Fully Leptonic Decays of B Mesons, 1996 (spire)

Semileptonic decays

• J. P. Lees et al. (BABAR Collaboration), Measurement of the $B^+ \to \omega \ell^+ \nu$ branching fraction with semileptonically tagged B mesons, Phys. Rev. D 88, 072006 (2013) (doi:10.1103/PhysRevD.88.072006)

• Xian-Wei Kang, Tao Luo, Yi Zhang, Ling-Yun Dai, Chao Wang, Semileptonic $B$ and $B_s$ decays involving scalar and axial-vector mesons, Eur. Phys. J. C 78, 909 (2018) (doi:10.1140/epjc/s10052-018-6385-9)

In relation to flavor anomalies

Discussion of leptonic decays in view of observed flavour anomalies:

• N. Penalva, E. Hernández, J. Nieves, Hadron and lepton tensors in semileptonic decays including new physics (arXiv:2004.08253)

• N. Penalva, E. Hernández, J. Nieves, $\bar B_c \to \eta_c$, $\bar B_c \to J/\psi$ and $\bar B \to D^{(\ast)}$ semileptonic decays including new physics (arXiv:2007.12590)