W Boson Beam Weapon

[Berserk Mecha]

So, I'm browsing Wikipedia and projectrho.com for some inspiration regarding exotic beam weaponry. (For a space novel of mine.) There are quite a few articles explaining the feasibility / infeasibility of weapons that use plasma, mesons, neutrons, lasers, and other such particles. While looking at a diagram of the Standard Model, I noticed that the W and Z bosons and saw that they have substantial mass. Z bosons do not have charge, so I imagine that it will be difficult to propel them without some chemical reaction.

But what of W bosons? Suppose that there is a gun that uses nuclear material as fuel to create W bosons and uses Lorentz force to propel the bosons forward. Is such a thing feasible? If so, how long would be beam last? Would it produce a lot of heat? Would it produce other particles as a byproduct? Would it need a lot of energy? I'm asking you theoretical tech-heads out there to help a fellow geek get some ideas.

[Citizen Nij]

Travelling at the speed of light in vacuum, they could go a total of about 9 x 10-17 metres, before decaying into various other things. May as well just fire regular particles - it's a heck of a lot simpler and effective.

[Kazyan]

I was just looking up subatomic particles the other day, and, yeah, W bosons have the one of the shortest half-lifes known.

Their speeds would have to be way, way into relativistic territory to get the time dilation extreme enough that the bosons could travel any significant distance. Even the speed of the "Oh-my-god particle" is nowhere near sufficient.

However, a W boson has only about 85.7 times the mass of a proton. You could save yourself the trouble and use a large atomic nucleus, such as uranium-238, which would be even heavier. Or, if you want the shenanigans that come with your particles decaying when they hit the target, fire neutrons--they'll hit atomic nuclei and probably make them radioactive. If you have trouble getting uncharged neutrons up to speed, instead use something like...a quick lookup on wikipedia says Seaborgium-267 will decay by spontaneous fission 83% of the time, which releases some neutrons and other hilarious decay products, with a half-life of 1.4 minutes. Which is about right for this application.

[Berserk Mecha]

Thanks for the input. I was hoping to use some weapon that would only require electricity to use. Hence, why I was looking toward the boson side of the standard model. I think I'll end up going with some hadron beam using heavy elements for ammo and probably mix it up with lasers.