Definitions

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.

  • noun Any of the three least massive mesons, having a positive, neutral, or negative electric charge. The charged pions have a mass 273 times that of an electron and a mean lifetime of 2.6 × 10−8 second, and the neutral pion has a mass 264 times that of an electron and a mean lifetime of 8.4 × 10−17 second.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

  • noun physics Any of three semistable mesons, having positive, negative or neutral charge, composed of up and down quarks/antiquarks.

from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.

  • noun a meson involved in holding the nucleus together; produced as the result of high-energy particle collision

Etymologies

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition

[Contraction of pi meson.]

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

From pi + -on, as alteration of pi-meson.

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