The most common decay modes of the meson are at, at, and various indistinguishable combinations of s and pions at. In all cases, it decays via the strong force. The pion channel would naïvely be the dominant decay channel because the collective mass of the pions is smaller than that of the kaons, making it energetically favorable; however, it is suppressed by the OZI rule.
The quark composition of the meson can be thought of as a mix between,, and states, but it is very nearly a pure state. This can be shown by deconstructing the wave function of the into its component parts. We see that the and mesons are mixtures of the SU wave functions as follows. where is the nonet mixing angle, and The mixing angle at which the components decouple completely can be calculated to be about 35.3˚. The mixing angle of the and states is calculated from the masses of each state to be about 35˚, which is very close to maximum decoupling. Therefore, the meson is nearly a pure state.
History
The existence of the meson was first proposed by the Japanese Americanparticle physicist, J. J. Sakurai, in 1962 as a resonance state between the and the. It was discovered later in 1962 by Connolly, et al. in a 20-inch hydrogen bubble chamber at the Alternating Gradient Synchrotron in Brookhaven National Laboratory in Uptown, NY while they were studying collisions at approximately 2.23 GeV/c. In essence, the reaction involved a beam of s being accelerated to high energies to collide with protons. The meson has several possible decay modes. The most energetically favored mode involves the meson decaying into 3 pions, which is what would naïvely be expected. However, we instead observe that it decays most frequently into 2 kaons. Between 1963 and 1966, 3 people, Susumu Okubo, George Zweig and Jugoro Iizuka, each independently proposed a rule to account for the observed suppression of the 3 pion decay. This rule is now known as the OZI rule and is also the currently accepted explanation for the unusually long lifetimes of the and mesons. Namely, on average they last and respectively. This is compared to the normal mean lifetime of a meson decaying via the strong force, which is on the order of. In 1999, a factory named DAFNE began operation to study the decay of the meson in Frascati, Italy. It produces mesons via electron-positron collisions. It has numerous detectors, including the KLOE detector which was in operation at the beginning of its operation.
