Helicity content of a quantized Weyl field

ID: helicity-content-of-a-quantized-weyl-field

A left-handed massless Weyl spinor has a positive-energy plane wave transforming by under a rotation about its momentum. Its particle has helicity . The negative-frequency term multiplies an antiparticle fermionic creation operator, so its corresponding one-particle state carries the conjugate rotation phase and helicity . Thus a left-handed field has one particle and one antiparticle helicity; the right-handed field interchanges the signs. A full massless Dirac field contains both chiral fields and hence both particle helicities.

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