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I Elementary particle transformations/couplings

  1. Mar 17, 2017 #1

    I'm not sure if this idea is something old that's been discussed to death or something I'm not formulating right, but i can't find anything online like what I would expect to.

    What I mean, is a list or rather a table of all possible elementary particle transformations and couplings from low to high energy states and vice versa.

    For example 2 photons can come together to create an electron. Also an e- neutrino + a W- = e- ; an e- + W- can create a e- neutrino...
    An anti/neutrino pair can temporarily annihilate into a Z0. Also W+ + W- -> Z0 + Photon
    Z0 can couple to neutrinos and photons (as far as i found).
    in udd to udu decay: an antineutrino and an e- is created and a W- exchanged.

    What i mean is that this looks like a 'chain', like a list of operations necessary to obtain a certain fermion or boson, from small energy scales to higher energy scales. I was trying to find the complete 'chain' but apparently the idea it's self doesn't have a name or any term i can find.

    The idea it's self seems sound as if @ big bang+1 you only had one type of particle and all the rest appeared by interactions between these as the universe cooled down... and by creating very high energy states (like quark-gluon plasma) you can recreate a similar initial state...

    I'm not looking at probabilities for such events to occur, but some at least do and i was searching either for a list, a table or ideally for the complete chain. What am I missing here ?

    (a random idea: the probability for each transformation should be reflected (aka proportional to) by how much of each type of elementary particle there is... so for example you need 3x quarks + 1 electron / hydrogen atom ; 12 q and 2 e- for one helium atom and i would have no clue how to estimate the amount of bosons that are exchanged / second for each but i'm sure there would be a rough estimate at least => on a large scale the probability amplitude for photon creation by various couplings should be the biggest... followed by idk... the next most frequent coupling by rough amount of particles of that type is present)
  2. jcsd
  3. Mar 18, 2017 #2


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    I don't know, what you mean by "particle transformations", but you can find a list of all (known) elementary particles and hadrons and many of their properties here:

  4. Mar 18, 2017 #3

    Thanks for the reply!

    To make myself a bit more clear... I mean a list of all possible couplings whereby another elementary particle is created out of an interaction... ex: http://www.quantumdiaries.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/qed_bbbar_sChannel.png (this would be an example of how to create quarks out of an electron/positron pair annihilation aka lepton to hadron transformation)

    Ranked by energy levels preferably. Ex: knowing that not any interaction is permitted what would be the necessary 'steps' to create an up quark from let's say... idk.. neutrinos (random example, dunno if it's even possible because i can't find the info :))) )
  5. Mar 18, 2017 #4


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    Regarding the first post, two photons can't come together to make an electron, but an electron-positron pair.

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