How does weak force cause decay

How does weak force cause beta decay? Zack M. Mar 4, Explanation: The weak interaction, or weak force, allows quarks to change flavor. Related questions Does gravitational force get weaker with distance? How strong is gravitational force? How does cosmic background radiation change the universe? How does gravity affect the universe? What does red shift mean? Does it push the red particle of the picture away from the nucleus? Is it called a force only because it has some corresponding force particles?

And if it is a force, what does it act on? I looked over at ' Weak force: attractive or repulsive? It is a great answer on how weak charges work and what types of weak charges there are. But, what it does not answer is whether it is a force or not. That is what I want to know, why do we include it in the four fundamental forces?

The weak force is one of the fundamental forces, but it doesn't have a strong attractive or repulsive effect on particles, and the term "weak interaction" is often preferred. For details on the attractions and repulsions associated with the weak interaction please see this answer by Alfred Centauri. All of the fundamental fermions i. In contrast, the strong force only affects quarks, not leptons.

The weak interaction changes the flavor of quarks and leptons. It acts on the particles' weak hypercharge , which is a component of weak isospin. Below are some Feynman diagrams, courtesy of Wikipedia , that illustrate a typical weak interaction: the capture of an electron by a proton. The weak interaction changes the flavor of a quark in the proton from up to down and it changes the electron to an electron neutrino.

BTW, the total mass of the decay products is less than the mass of the neutron, but energy is conserved because the decay products have kinetic energy. I should mention that at very high energy, the weak interaction and the electromagnetic force unite into the electroweak interaction :. Although these two forces appear very different at everyday low energies, the theory models them as two different aspects of the same force.

Above the unification energy, on the order of GeV, they would merge into a single force. During the quark epoch, the electroweak force split into the electromagnetic and weak force.

As it seems that you aren't terribly familiar with the nitty-gritty mathematics of quantum mechanics and believe me, I'm not either , perhaps I can bridge your curiosity to a more intuitive understanding of what the weak force is.

This may not be a fully-fledged answer, however my thoughts are too long to fit within a comment. Hence Wikipedia's nomenclature for the weak force being one of the "Fundamental interactions". That being said, as physics has progressed through the notion of forces being synonymous with fields, think the gravitational field, or electromagnetic field , there's been a development in understanding that these fields are all resultant of "force-carrying" bosons.

These are the quantum , or "units" of the field. To oversimplify: wherever there's a boson, theres a set of interactions with said boson and other particles where particles combine and decay and transmit information, etc All those interactions inevitably do what looks like pushing or pulling when viewed from far away.

Hence, the notion of a force is really just the biproduct of all the motion occurring from those interactions. Since these fit the parameter of being bosons, this implies that they carry out a bunch of interactions, and a lot to do with quarks. These interactions are relatively weak compared to others, hence ladies, and gentlemen , the weak force. As detailed in the last few paragraphs, technically yes.

You are correct with that perspective. Mind you, there are many perspectives and interpretations on what forces really are and aren't. Since I've mentioned that a more modern interpretation of the the fundamental forces are to look at them as interactions, a more general question would be why are these interactions considered force-like?

In basic kinematics, a force according to my definition is simply an exertion of energy, which, when unimpeded will result in kinetic acceleration. This keeps the right balance of protons and neutrons in a nucleus. The weak force is very important in the nuclear fusion that happens in the sun. See size of the universe for a list of visuals demonstrating how short ranged the weak force is. As the name implies, the weak force is much weaker than the strong force, or the electromagnetic force , but it is quite a bit stronger than the gravitational force.

Modern physics has unified the electromagnetic and weak forces into the electroweak force. There is a continued effort to try to unify all of the forces in a grand unified theory. Fully understanding the weak force takes many years of study, but some fun places to start include hyperphysics or the blog of Prof.