Kaons

Quark Models of Kaons

Here are some quark models of kaons. All kaons are built-up around the heart of familial seeds shown on the left. Particles with a different angular momentum or charge are modeled by including various quarks around this common kernel. Then excited states are obtained by adding even more quarks. The kaons may share more quarks in addition to the familial pattern. But this nugget is the minimum necessary to distinguish the kaons from other particle families.  Nuclear particles are classified on this basis. EthnoPhysics analyzes the mechanics of kaons using chains of events  noted by where each repeated cycle is composed of the following quarks.

The foregoing quark models completely specify the quantum numbers of kaons. The charge, angular momentum, baryon-number, lepton-number and strangeness are all correct. These models also produce accurate calculated values for the lifetime, width and mass. Results that fall outside of experimental uncertainty are noted with an X in all tables. There are just a handful of these errors from among hundreds of particles.

Kaon Cores

Some highly excited states contain so many quarks that it may be difficult to see how the models work. So to view the underlying pattern, we ignore most of the quark/anti-quark pairs. The pairs are needed for stability. But these field quarks obscure the minimum number of quarks required to identify a particle and account for its mass.  So we remove them and the remaining core quarks are shown in the table below.

Fixing attention on the core shows more clearly how excited kaons are built-up over blocks of the same baryonic quarks. The mass depends on not . So is unchanged by any variation in the field of pairs. A particle’s rest mass is completely determined by its core quarks.

Neutral Kaons

The foregoing table shows that in their cores, the neutral kaons contain exactly zero baryonic quarks. This makes them somewhat different from the other kaons shown below. For example, the quarks in neutral kaons are strongly bound together compared to the weaker forces that bind charged kaons.

Charged Kaons

Tauonic Kaons

The following kaons are considered separately because they show different patterns of size and composition. They all have about the same mass as each other. But the nuclear processes that yield them are different, and sometimes involve the decay of tauonic leptons. They could possibly be associated with amperic neutrinos.

Experimentally observed values are taken from this reference .

Kaon Calculations

Here is a spreadsheet that shows a step-by-step calculation of kaons characteristics. For more detail about cell contents and formulae, click the download link at the bottom of the sheet. Then you can enter other quark-coefficients in the yellow cells to assess different particle models.

The electric and magnetic radii of this kaon are both significant. But its central-radius is extremely small, so K⁺ is essentially a two-dimensional particle. It is shaped like a thin disc. Next, here are some details about the neutral, long-lived kaon.

The electric-radius of this kaon is exactly zero. So its radius vector lies in a two-dimensional plane formed by the magnetic and central-axes of quark space.