D meson

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The D mesons are the lightest particle containing charm quarks. They are often studied to gain knowledge on the weak interaction. ^[1]

1 Overview
2 List of D mesons
3 See Also
4 References

[edit] Overview

The D mesons were discovered in 1976 during the Mark I experiments at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center ^[2]

Since the D meson is the lightest meson containing a charm quark, it must change the charm quark into another quark to decay. Quark transmutations take place via the weak interaction. In D mesons, the charm quark changes into a strange quark with a W particle and then decays into K's and π's. ^[3]

[edit] List of D mesons

Particle	Symbol	Anti-particle	Quark Makeup	Spin and parity	Rest mass MeV/c²	S	C	Mean lifetime s
D meson	D⁺	D⁻	-c d	Pseudoscalar	1869	0	+1	1.6×10⁻¹²
D meson	D⁰	D⁰	c u	Pseudoscalar	1865	0	+1	4.1×10⁻¹³
Strange D meson	D+s	D−s	c s	Pseudoscalar	1968	+1	+1	4.9×10⁻¹³