The rho mesons have a very short lifetime and their decay width is about 145 MeV with the peculiar feature that the decay widths are not described by a Breit–Wigner form. The principal decay route of the rho mesons is to a pair of pions with a branching rate of 99.9%.[d]
The rho mesons can be interpreted[3] as a bound state of a quark and an anti-quark and is an excited version of the pion. Unlike the pion, the rho meson has spin j = 1 (a vector meson) and a much higher value of the mass. This mass difference between the pions and rho mesons is attributed to a large hyperfine interaction between the quark and anti-quark. The main objection with the De Rujula–Georgi–Glashow description is that it attributes the lightness of the pions as an accident rather than a result of chiral symmetry breaking.
^ abcdThe exact value depends on the method used. See the given reference for detail. In the table, data used is from tau decays and electron–positron annihilation.
^ abcPDG reports the resonance width (Γ). Here the conversion τ = ħ⁄Γ is given instead.
^There should be a small mass difference between the ρ+ and the ρ0 that can be attributed to the electromagnetic self-energy of the particle as well as a small effect due to isospin breaking arising from the light quark masses; however, the current experimental limit is that this mass difference is less than 0.7 MeV.
^Neutral rho mesons can decay to a pair of electrons or muons which occurs with a branching ratio of 5×10−5. This decay of the neutral rho to leptons can be interpreted as a mixing between the photon and rho. In principle the charged rho mesons mix with the weak vector bosons and can lead to decay to an electron or muon plus a neutrino; however, this has never been observed.