Lesson Plan: Strangeness Physics
This lesson plan includes the objectives, prerequisites, and exclusions of the lesson teaching students how to determine the strangeness of composite particles and sets of particles and whether given interactions conserve strangeness.
Objectives
Students will be able to
- recall what the strangeness of each of the quarks and leptons is,
- recall that the strangeness of a composite particle is the sum of the strangeness of each of its constituent particles,
- determine the total strangeness of a set of particles before and after an interaction based on a nuclear equation for that interaction,
- recall that strangeness is conserved in strong and electromagnetic interactions, but not the weak interaction.
Prerequisites
Students should already be familiar with
- the names, basic properties, and symbols of all of the leptons, quarks, and their antiparticles,
- what hadrons, mesons, baryons, and hyperons are,
- some more common mesons and baryons.
Exclusions
Students will not cover
- charm, topness, bottomness,
- the underlying reason why strangeness is not conserved by the weak interaction,
- Feynman diagrams,
- colour charge,
- gluons.