section_path: Properties
section_name: Properties
paragraph_text: Properties
  
  The electrically charged weak interaction is unique in a number of respects:
  
  Due to their large mass (approximately 90 GeV/ c) these carrier particles, called the W and Z bosons, are short-lived with a lifetime of under 10 seconds. The weak interaction has a coupling constant (an indicator of how frequently interactions occur) between 10 and 10, compared to the electromagnetic coupling constant of about 10 and the strong interaction coupling constant of about 1; consequently the weak interaction is "weak" in terms of intensity. The weak interaction has a very short effective range (around 10 to 10 m (0.01 to 0.1 fm)). At distances around 10 meters (0.001 fm), the weak interaction has an intensity of a similar magnitude to the electromagnetic force, but this starts to decrease exponentially with increasing distance. Scaled up by just one and a half orders of magnitude, at distances of around 3 × 10 m, the weak interaction becomes 10,000 times weaker.
  
  The weak interaction affects all the fermions of the Standard Model, as well as the Higgs boson; neutrinos interact only through gravity and the weak interaction. The weak interaction does not produce bound states, nor does it involve binding energy – something that gravity does on an astronomical scale, the electromagnetic force does at the molecular and atomic levels, and the strong nuclear force does only at the subatomic level, inside of nuclei.
  
  Its most noticeable effect is due to its first unique feature: The charged weak interaction causes flavour change. For example, a neutron is heavier than a proton (its partner nucleon) and can decay into a proton by changing the flavour (type) of one of its two down quarks to an up quark. Neither the strong interaction nor electromagnetism permit flavour changing, so this can only proceed by weak decay; without weak decay, quark properties such as strangeness and charm (associated with the strange quark and charm quark, respectively) would also be conserved across all interactions.
  
  All mesons are unstable because of weak decay. In the process known as beta decay, a down quark in the neutron can change into an up quark by emitting a virtual W boson, which then decays into an electron and an electron antineutrino. Another example is electron capture – a common variant of radioactive decay – wherein a proton and an electron within an atom interact and are changed to a neutron (an up quark is changed to a down quark), and an electron neutrino is emitted.
  
  Due to the large masses of the W bosons, particle transformations or decays (e.g., flavour change) that depend on the weak interaction typically occur much more slowly than transformations or decays that depend only on the strong or electromagnetic forces. For example, a neutral pion decays electromagnetically, and so has a life of only about 10 seconds. In contrast, a charged pion can only decay through the weak interaction, and so lives about 10 seconds, or a hundred million times longer than a neutral pion. A particularly extreme example is the weak-force decay of a free neutron, which takes about 15 minutes.