Hyperon

From Star Trek : Freedom's Wiki
Jump to: navigation, search

In particle physics, a hyperon is any baryon containing one or more strange quarks, but no charm quarks or bottom quarks.

Being baryons, all hyperons are fermions. That is, they have half-integer spin and obey Fermi-Dirac statistics. They all interact via the strong nuclear force, making them types of hadron. They are composed of three light quarks, at least one of which is a strange quark, which makes them strange baryons. Hyperons decay weakly with non-conserved parity.

Since strangeness is conserved by the strong interactions, the ground-state hyperons cannot decay strongly. However, they do participate in strong interactions.