General Relations
Angular Distribution of Two-Body Decay
Let's begin with a general amplitude for the two-body decay of a state with angular momentum quantum numbers J,m. Specifically, we want to know the amplitude of this state having daughter 1 with trajectory
.
We can also describe the angular momentum between the daughters as being L and spin sum as s. Alternatively, we will label the daughters as having helicities of
and
- projections on the direction of decay (specified by daughter 1)
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insertion of the complete set of helicity basis vectors
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| Failed to parse (MathML with SVG or PNG fallback (recommended for modern browsers and accessibility tools): Invalid response ("Math extension cannot connect to Restbase.") from server "https://wikimedia.org/api/rest_v1/":): {\displaystyle \langle \Omega \lambda_1 \lambda_2 | U | J m \rangle = \sum_{L,S} \langle \Omega \lambda_1 \lambda_2 | J m \lambda_1 \lambda_2 \rangle \langle J m \lambda_1 \lambda_2 | J m L S \rangle \langle J m L S | U | J m \rangle }
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insertion of the complete LS basis set
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| Failed to parse (MathML with SVG or PNG fallback (recommended for modern browsers and accessibility tools): Invalid response ("Math extension cannot connect to Restbase.") from server "https://wikimedia.org/api/rest_v1/":): {\displaystyle =\sum_{L,S} \left[ \sqrt{\frac{2J+1}{4\pi}} D_{m \lambda}^{J *}(\Omega,0) \right] \left[ \sqrt{\frac{2L+1}{2J+1}} \left(\begin{array}{cc|c} L & S & J \\ 0 & \lambda & \lambda \end{array}\right) \left(\begin{array}{cc|c} S_1 & S_2 & S \\ \lambda_1 & -\lambda_2 & \lambda \end{array}\right) \right] a_{L S}^{J} }
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Substitution of each bra-ket with their respective formulae.
Note that in the event of one daughter being spin-less, the second
Clebsch-Gordan coefficient is 1
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Isospin Projections
One must also take into account the various ways isospin of daughters can add up to the isospin quantum numbers of the parent, requiring a term:
where a=1 and b=2, referring to the daughter number. Because an even-symmetric angular wave function (i.e. L=0,2...) imply that 180 degree rotation is equivalent to reversal of daughter identities (a,b becoming b,a) one must write down the symmetrized expression:
Application