# Tag Info

## New answers tagged chirality

1

Short answer is we don't know, there may be right handed neutrinos and left handed antineutrinos that either don't interact through the weak force or do so extremely less than neutrinos. Sterile neutrinos a theoretical candidate for these particles.

-1

No, no, no. Helicity and chirality are not the same thing in the massless limit. They are unrelated. Helicity is an extrinsic physical property related to the alignment of spin and momentum; chirality is related to weak interactions. Chirality is more akin to electric charge or strong color charge than it is to momentum.

3

For massive spinors "right-handed" and "left-handed" chirality isn't tied so much to true rotations, as to the casting of Lorentz transformations as "space-time rotations". In this case, a very popular short answer to the conceptual question is that Lorentz transformations "rotate" $(1/2, 0)$-spinors one way in space-time, and $(0, 1/2)$-spinors the opposite ...

12

Photons, as each massless particles, are characterized not by spin (which is defined as total angular momentum at rest, and mathematically corresponds to irreducible representation of the little group of representation), but by helicity $\lambda$ - the projection of total angular momentum on the direction of motion. Actually, the Casimir operator, which ...

16

By definition of spin $S$ it is a positive integer number or zero. Not to confuse with the spin projection possible values $S_z$, which may run from $-S$ to $S$.

5

Spin 1 just means that the spin in any direction can assume values out of {-1,0,1}. The 0 is only possible for massive particles, so the photon can have spin -1 or +1. That's like clockwise and anticlockwise circular polarization

Top 50 recent answers are included