What are possible lifetimes of up/down quarks, electronic/muonic/tau neutrinos, photon, gluon?
I understand they are said to be stable, but, as I saw on wikipedia, the lower bound for the "stable" electron's mean lifetime is $4.6×10^{26}$years. Are there any bounds for the mentioned particles?
Answer
Here is the elementary particle table of the Standard Model
Stability for these building blocks of matter is an experimental observation, with limits for the ones never seen to decay. Columns II and III have measured lifetimes, excepting the neutrinos.Z and W also have measured lifetimes.
The neutrinos have a very small mass and there is nothing with smaller mass they could decay into except each other, and that is called neutrino oscillations and have been measured.
The photon and gluon have 0 mass and cannot decay.
The u and d are bounded in lifetime by the order of 10^34years of the proton decay.
The theory of the Standard Model describes all the existing data very successfully. New theories will have to embed it and predict/give these experimental bounds.
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