September 19, 2017 Daily Blog

So today I learned how to fly the drone and I continued to study Quarkonium. I found a great article on it, but as I kept reading I found that there are still many quantum mechanic terms that I do not fully understand. In particular what really was messing me up was "The quarkonium states with masses below the threshold for decays to open- flavour hadrons (i.e. containing non-zero flavour quantum numbers) to be kinematically allowed (m D D ̄ ≈ 3.74 GeV for charmonium and m B B ̄ ≈ 10.56 GeV for bottomonium) are typically narrow states which decay via the electromagnetic and strong interactions to lower mass quarkonium states, light hadrons or charged leptons. Quarkonium states above the relevant open-flavour threshold generally have much larger total decay widths that are dominated by strong decays to open-flavour hadrons." I understand the concept of flavour, but I do not know what open-flavour is. I also tried to do some more research today and I still don't fully know what narrow states are. I think that tomorrow I am going to email Dr. Lincoln and Dr. Yoho with my questions.