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Delta baryon



The Delta baryon is a relatively light 1,232 MeV/c² baryon which contains only up (u) and down (d) quarks in a combination whose total spin is 3/2 and its ground state parity is +.

Decay

All varieties of Δ quickly decay via the strong force into an ordinary nucleon plus a pion, with the amplitudes of various final charge states given by their respective isospin couplings. More rarely and more slowly, the Δ+ can decay into a proton and a photon and the Δ0 can decay into neutron and a photon.

Composition

The 3/2 spin means that all the quarks inside a Δ particle have their spin axes pointing in the same direction, unlike the nearly identical proton and neutron (called "nucleons") in which the intrinsic spin of one of the three constituent quarks is always opposite the spin of the other two. This difference in spin alignment is the only quantum number distinction between the Δ+ and Δ0 and ordinary nucleons, whose spin is 1/2.

The Δ family consists of four different particles distinguished by their electrical charges, which is the sum of the charges of the mixture of up (u) and down (d) quarks which compose the Δ:

Particle Symbol Makeup Rest mass
MeV/c2
S C B Mean lifetime
s
Decays to
Delta Δ++ uuu 1232 0 0 0 6×10-24 π+ + p
Delta Δ+ uud 1232 0 0 0 6×10-24 π+ + n or
π0 + p
Delta Δ0 udd 1232 0 0 0 6×10-24 π0 + n or
π + p
Delta Δ ddd 1232 0 0 0 6×10-24 π + n

There are also four antiparticles with opposite charges, made up of the corresponding antiquarks.

The existence of the Δ++, with its unusual +2 charge, was a crucial clue in the development of the quark model.

See also

 
This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article "Delta_baryon". A list of authors is available in Wikipedia.
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