During the 1960s, as part of their new psychotronic superweapon project, American particle physicists have started to systematically investigate the physics of electron and muon pairs, quantum¡¡ electrodynamics, the production and decay of photon-like particles, and searching for new particles which decay to electron or muon pairs. These types of experiments are characterized by the need for a high-intensity incident flux, for high rejection against a large number of unwanted background events, and at the same time the need for a detector with good mass resolution.

In order to search for new particles at a higher mass, experiments conducted at the Brookhaven National Laboratory lead to the discovery of new totally unpredicted heavy particles. Since then a whole family of new particles has been found, including: pions, kaons, eta mesons, D mesons, psi/J particles, upsilon particles.

The tau particle is a heavy electron-like particle discovered in the 1970s by the team of American particle physicist Martin Perl at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center. Soon after its production the tau particle decays into various collections of more stable particles. About 86% of the time the decay involves just one charged particle. The one-charged-particle event is made up of four major modes of decay as well as a collection of other events. The four main types of decay are denoted rho, pi, e and mu.

Related Links:

Mesons
http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/particles/meson.html#c1

Tau decay physics
http://www.lns.cornell.edu/public/CLEO/CLEO3/cleo3/proposal/subsection3_3_3.html


Informant: colonel_yuri