It turns out that when a particle decays it
changes into a less massive particle and a
force-carrier particle (always a W boson if it is a fundamental particle; some hadrons
may decay with gluons or photons resulting).
These force carriers may then re-emerge as other particles.
So, a particle does not just change into another particle type;
there is an intermediate force-carrier particle which
mediates particle decays.
In many cases, these temporary force-carrier
particles seem to violate the conservation of energy
because their mass is greater than the available energy in the reaction. However,
these particles exist so briefly that, because of
Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle, no rules are broken.
These are called virtual particles.
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A particle decays into a less massive particle and a
force-carrier particle, which then
decays into other particles (in this illustration, a W boson decays to u and d quarks).
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