Zbosonene

Zbosonene refers to the Z bosons, neutral gauge bosons that mediate the weak neutral current in the Standard Model of particle physics. They arise from the electroweak symmetry breaking of SU(2)L × U(1)Y and, together with the W± bosons, constitute the gauge sector of the weak interaction.

Properties: Z bosons are spin-1 particles with no electric charge and no color charge. They have a mass of about 91 GeV and a total decay width of about 2.5 GeV, giving a very short lifetime. They couple to fermions via vector and axial-vector interactions, with couplings that depend on the fermion’s weak isospin and hypercharge. They do not couple to photons directly, but interact through neutral current processes.

Production and decays: In high-energy collisions, Z bosons are produced predominantly by quark-antiquark annihilation and can be observed as resonances at the Z pole in electron-positron and hadron colliders. They decay mainly into hadrons (around 70%), with about 10% into charged lepton pairs (e+e−, μ+μ−, τ+τ−, roughly 3.3% per channel) and the remainder into neutrino-antineutrino pairs.

History and significance: The Z boson was discovered in 1983 by the UA1 and UA2 experiments at CERN’s SPS collider. Precision measurements of its properties have been central to testing the electroweak sector of the Standard Model and constraining fundamental parameters, such as the weak mixing angle and the masses of heavier particles.

See also: electroweak interaction; W boson; neutral current.