bosons and mesons
by John Hawkhead
all the stuff we talk about
just interactions
In particle physics, bosons are subatomic particles whose spin quantum number has an integer value and which obey Bose-Einstein statistics. Examples of bosons include the Higgs boson particle and photons (light).
Mesons are a form of boson: they’re hadronic subatomic particles composed of an equal number of quarks and antiquarks bound together by a strong interaction. Mesons are the interaction agents between protons and electrons, but are unstable outside of the nucleus, decaying to particles such as electrons, neutrinos and photons. Despite their small size (0.6 times the size of a proton or neutron) and instability, they’re observable by particle detectors and have been used to study the properties and interactions of quarks.
Further reading:
‘Boson’, Wikipedia article – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boson
‘Bosons and Fermions’, Office of Science, US Department of Energy – https://www.energy.gov/science/doe-explainsbosons-and-fermions
‘Meson’, Vedantu article – https://www.vedantu.com/physics/meson
‘Meson’, Wikipedia article – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meson
‘Meson’, Encyclopaedia Britannica article – https://www.britannica.com/science/meson
Author bio:
John Hawkhead (@HawkheadJohn) has been writing haiku and illustrating for over 25 years. His work has been published all over the world and he has won a number of haiku competitions. John’s books of haiku and senryu, ‘Small Shadows’ and ‘Bone Moon’, are now available from Alba Publishing (http://www.albapublishing.com/).
Enjoyed John’s sciku? Check out more of his sciku here: ‘Dark matter’, ‘Chirality’, ‘Spooky Interaction’, ‘Dancing’, ‘Planetarium’, ‘Empty Space’, ‘Averages’, ‘New Beginning’, and ‘Surface Tension’.