Thursday, January 26, 2017

time - Why do electrons, according to my textbook, exist forever?


Does that mean that electrons are infinitely stable? The neutrinos of the three leptons are also listed as having a mean lifespan of infinity.



Answer




Imagine you are an electron. You have decided you have lived long enough, and wish to decay. What are your options, here? Gell-Mann said that in particle physics, "whatever is not forbidden is mandatory," so if we can identify something you can decay to, you should do that.


We'll go to your own rest frame--any decay you can do has to occur in all reference frames, and it's easiest/most limiting to talk about the electron's rest frame. In this frame, you have no kinetic energy, only rest mass energy equal to about 511 keV. So whatever you decay to has to have less rest mass than that--you might decay to a 300 keV particle, and give it 100 keV of kinetic energy, but you can't decay to a 600 keV particle. (There's no way to offset this with kinetic energy--no negative kinetic energy.) Unfortunately, every other charged lepton and every quark is heavier than that. So what options does that leave us? Well, there are massless particles (photon, gluon, graviton). There are also the neutrinos, which are all so close to massless that it took until very recently for anyone to tell that this was not the case. So you can decay to neutrinos and force carriers, maybe. Except then you run into a problem: none of these have any electric charge, and your decay has to conserve charge. You're stuck.


tl;dr: Electrons are the lightest negatively charged particle and therefore cannot decay into lighter particles without violating charge conservation.


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