Lesson Plan: Charm Physics
This lesson plan includes the objectives, prerequisites, and exclusions of the lesson teaching students how to determine the charm of composite particles and sets of particles and whether given interactions conserve charm.
Objectives
Students will be able to
- recall what the charm of each of the quarks and leptons is,
- recall that the charm of a composite particle is the sum of the charm of each of its constituent particles,
- determine the total charm of a set of particles before and after an interaction based on a nuclear equation for that interaction,
- recall that charm is conserved in strong and electromagnetic interactions but not in the weak interactions.
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
- strangeness, topness, bottomness,
- the underlying reason why charm is not conserved by the weak interactions,
- Feynman diagrams,
- color charge,
- gluons.