I am interested in knowing how (Q1) the particle\'s masses are experimentally de
ID: 1379346 • Letter: I
Question
I am interested in knowing how (Q1) the particle's masses are experimentally determined from accelerator observations.
What kind of particles? They must be as far as we know elementary and unstable (very short lifetime) and not subject to the strong interaction (for example, Higgs particle, Z boson, etc.) I'm not interested in neutrons (not elementary), electrons (stable) or quarks (hadron). I'm not particularly interested in neutrinos either, since I think that best constraints come from neutrino oscillations and cosmological observations.
Since the particles I'm asking about acquire their masses through the Higgs mechanism, I would like to know what is actually or more directly measured the mass or the Yukawa coupling. (Q2)
I also wonder what is actually measured the propagator's pole (this the magnitude reported as mass for stable leptons) or the running mass at certain energy scale (this is one of the magnitudes reported as mass for quarks). (Q3)
This question may be considered a follow-up of How Can We Measure The Mass Of Particle?
Thanks in advance.
Explanation / Answer
For sufficiently long-lived charged particles, one measures the helix-shaped track in an external magnetic field, and gets from this the 4-momentum (and hence the masss).
For very short-lived particles, one gets complex masses from resonance measurements.
Edit: Any mass of an unstable particle is complex and defined as the pole of a propagator. The mass of a particle like Higgs is determined quite indirectly, as it takes lots of scattering experiments to reliably determine the relevant cross sections
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