Decay law and time dilatation

TL;DR

This paper investigates the decay law for moving unstable particles, revealing that the standard time-dilatation formula is generally inaccurate in quantum contexts and providing an improved, more precise formula.

Contribution

The authors derive an analytic expression for the decay law of moving unstable particles, correcting the standard formula and analyzing the effects of quantum measurement and wave packets.

Findings

Standard decay width formula is inaccurate for quantum states.

The deviation from the standard formula is small and maximizes at p/M=√2/3.

A general expression for non-decay probability in quantum states is provided.

Abstract

We study the decay law for a moving unstable particle. The usual time-dilatation formula states that the decay width for an unstable state moving with a momentum $p$ and mass $M$ is $\tilde{\Gamma}_{p}=\Gamma M/\sqrt{p^{2}+M^{2}}$ with $\Gamma$ being the decay width in the rest frame. In agreement with previous studies, we show that in the context of QM as well as QFT this equation is \textit{not} correct provided that the quantum measurement is performed in a reference frame in which the unstable particle has momentum $p$ (note, a momentum eigenstate is \textit{not} a velocity eigenstate in QM). We then give, to our knowledge for the first time, an analytic expression of an improved formula and we show that the deviation from $\tilde{\Gamma}_{p}$ has a maximum for $p/M=\sqrt{2/3},$ but is typically \textit{very} small. Then, the result can be easily generalized to a momentum wave packet and also to an arbitrary initial state. Here, we give a very general expression of the non-decay probability. As a next step, we show that care is needed when one makes a boost of an unstable state with zero momentum/velocity: namely, the resulting state has zero overlap with the elements of the basis of unstable states (it is already decayed!). However, when considering a spread in velocity, one finds again that $\tilde{\Gamma }_{p}$ is typically a very good approximation. The study of a velocity wave-packet represents an interesting subject which constitutes one of the main outcomes of the present manuscript.\textbf{ }In the end, it should be stressed that there is no whatsoever breaking of special relativity, but as usual in QM, one should specify which kind of measurement on which kind of state is performed.