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The name lepton comes from the Greek λεπτός leptós, "fine, small, thin" (neuter nominative/accusative singular form: λεπτόν leptón); [14] [15] the earliest attested form of the word is the Mycenaean Greek 𐀩𐀡𐀵, re-po-to, written in Linear B syllabic script. [16] Lepton was first used by physicist Léon Rosenfeld in 1948: [17]
Except for the proton and neutron, all other hadrons are unstable and decay into other particles in microseconds or less. A proton is made of two up quarks and one down quark, while the neutron is made of two down quarks and one up quark. These commonly bind together into an atomic nucleus, e.g. a helium-4 nucleus is composed of two protons and ...
A muon (/ ˈ m (j) uː. ɒ n / M(Y)OO-on; from the Greek letter mu (μ) used to represent it) is an elementary particle similar to the electron, with an electric charge of −1 e and spin-1/2, but with a much greater mass.
The tau (τ), also called the tau lepton, tau particle or tauon, is an elementary particle similar to the electron, with negative electric charge and a spin of 1 / 2 .Like the electron, the muon, and the three neutrinos, the tau is a lepton, and like all elementary particles with half-integer spin, the tau has a corresponding antiparticle of opposite charge but equal mass and spin.
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This implies that the lepton must be emitted with spin in the direction of its linear momentum (i.e., also right-handed). If, however, leptons were massless, they would only interact with the pion in the left-handed form (because for massless particles helicity is the same as chirality) and this decay mode would be prohibited.
The W bosons can subsequently decay either into a quark and an antiquark or into a charged lepton and a neutrino. The decays of W bosons into quarks are difficult to distinguish from the background, and the decays into leptons cannot be fully reconstructed (because neutrinos are impossible to detect in particle collision experiments).
1932 Antielectron (or positron), the first antiparticle, discovered by Carl D. Anderson [13] (proposed by Paul Dirac in 1927 and by Ettore Majorana in 1928) : 1937 Muon (or mu lepton) discovered by Seth Neddermeyer, Carl D. Anderson, J.C. Street, and E.C. Stevenson, using cloud chamber measurements of cosmic rays [14] (it was mistaken for the pion until 1947 [15])