Composition Elementary particle Status Hypothetical Mass ≈ 10 GeV/c | Statistics Bosonic Types 12 | |
Decays into X: two quarks, or one antiquark and one charged antilepton
Y: two quarks, or one antiquark and one charged antilepton, or one antiquark and one antineutrino | ||
In particle physics, the X and Y bosons (sometimes collectively called "X bosons") are hypothetical elementary particles analogous to the W and Z bosons, but corresponding to a new type of force predicted by the Georgi–Glashow model, a grand unified theory.
Details
The X and Y bosons couple quarks to leptons, allowing violation of the conservation of baryon number, and thus permitting proton decay.
An X boson would have the following decay modes:
X
→
u
+
u
X
→
e+
+
d
where the two decay products in each process have opposite chirality,
u
is an up quark,
d
is a down antiquark and
e+
is a positron.
A Y boson would have the following decay modes:
Y
→
e+
+
u
Y
→
d
+
u
Y
→
d
+
ν
e
where the first decay product in each process has left-handed chirality and the second has right-handed chirality and
ν
e is an electron antineutrino.
Similar decay products exist for the other quark-lepton generations
In these reactions, neither the lepton number (L) nor the baryon number (B) is conserved, but B − L is. Different branching ratios between the X boson and its antiparticle (as is the case with the K-meson) would explain baryogenesis.