I am a bit confused about the spin direction for a Weyl spinor. So as far as I understand, a Weyl spinor represents a massless fermion and it is an eigenstate of the helicity operator. Now say we have a right handed Weyl spinor traveling in the positive $x$ direction. This means that his spin will always point in the positive $x$ direction and the helicity will have an eigenvalue of 1/2. Now, Weyl spinor represents actual particles (at least theoretically, but I think they were used for neutrino, too) so these particles have 2 spin states. As initially the spin is along positive $x$ it looks like $(1/\sqrt 2,1/\sqrt 2)^T$. If we want to measure the spin along the $z$ direction we have 50-50 chances to get up and down. Now, if we measure the $x$ component (after we measured the $z$ component) we have 50% chances to find the spin in the state $(1/\sqrt 2,-1/\sqrt 2)^T$, so pointing along the negative $x$ direction. So just by measuring its spin, we have 25% chances to turn a right handed Weyl spinor into a left handed one (as the momentum doesn't change - $p$ and $S$ commute). Of course this is not right so something is wrong with my understanding of spin in the context of Weyl spinors. Can someone clarify this for me?
Weyl spinor's spin direction
Alex Marshall
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