Charm / Anticharm Annihilation

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• Frame 1: A charm and anticharm quark head towards each other....
• Frame 2: ...annihilate...
• Frame 3: ...into virtual gluons.
• Frame 4: A strange quark and an antistrange quark emerge from the gluon cloud.

• Frame 5: As the quarks move apart, a color force field develops between them.
• Frame 6: The energy in the field increases as the quarks further separate, until there is sufficient energy in the force field to be converted into an up quark and and an up antiquark.
• Frame 7: The up and antistrange quarks begin to separate.

• Frame 8: There is sufficient energy in the color field between the up quark and the strange antiquark to produce another quark-antiquark pair (down and antidown).
• Frame 9: The anti-up and strange quark segregate into a color neutral meson (a kaon).
• Frame 10: All the quarks have formed color neutral pairs. The up - antidown particle is a pion, and the down - antistrange particle is another kaon.

Each such decay yields a set of color neutral particles made from the quarks that materialize from the energy in the color force field. Many different outcomes are possible.

The intermediate stages of this process occur in less than almost a billionth of a billionth of a billionth of a second, and are not observable.

In order to better understand the processes, read more about quarks and quark confinement.

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