State-counting and helicity factors in pion decay

ID: state-counting-and-helicity-factors-in-pion-decay

In a box-normalized treatment of negative-pion two-body decay with a massless antineutrino, . The simple density of states is therefore proportional to . The spin-zero two-body helicity selection requires positive charged-lepton helicity, whose left-chiral weight is . Since , the energy factors cancel in the product and give the standard relative rate proportional to . A Lorentz-invariant phase-space measure distributes normalization factors differently but gives the same observable ratio when the amplitude is normalized consistently.

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