Muon neutrino Created 2026-10-05 Updated 2026-10-14
The muon neutrino is the neutral lepton coupled to a muon by the weak charged current. It carries lepton number ; its antineutrino has the opposite lepton number.
Neutral current Created 2026-10-14 Updated 2026-10-20
The weak neutral current couples the Z boson to a fermion without changing its electric charge. Its vector and axial-vector coefficients depend on weak isospin, electric charge, and the weak mixing angle.
The neutral current transfers no electric charge at a fermion vertex; “neutral” does not mean that every participating particle is uncharged. For example, transfers energy and momentum to an electron through Z boson exchange. By contrast, a charged current can convert a muon neutrino into a muon, as in . Both processes conserve total electric charge. A photon also carries no electric charge, but an active neutrino has no electromagnetic charge coupling: its neutral current is a distinct weak interaction.
The experimentally useful contrast on a nucleon target is
where is a nucleon and is an allowed final state of hadrons. The charged current makes a charged lepton available for identification; the outgoing neutrino in a neutral current leaves no bubble-chamber track. A sample of hadronic events without an identified muon therefore poses an experimental question: how many could instead be neutron interactions, or charged current events whose muon was missed? The answer requires a detector-response and background analysis, not merely an inspection for an absent line.
Neutral-current vector and axial couplings Created 2026-10-07 Updated 2026-10-18
If a neutral-current vertex has prefactor and chiral coefficients , then , with and . For one Standard Model charged lepton, ; for an active neutrino, . A prefactor instead requires doubled coefficients. Mixing these conventions creates a factor-of-four error in squared amplitudes.
Awarded in equal thirds to Leon Max Lederman, Melvin Schwartz and Jack Steinberger for the neutrino-beam method and demonstrating the doublet structure of leptons through discovery of the muon neutrino.[ref]
Nonleptonic baryon decay 2026-10-18
A weak interaction decay of a baryon into final hadrons without final leptons. A weak charged current changes quark flavour, while spectator quarks and the produced quarks undergo hadronization. A quark-flow Feynman diagram specifies a possible weak topology; it does not calculate the full hadronic decay amplitude.
Nonleptonic meson decay 2026-10-18
A nonleptonic meson decay contains final hadrons and no final leptons. Weak quark transitions set flavour factors, but strong hadronization and additional hadronic matrix elements are needed to determine exclusive rates.
Orthogonal completion of mixed neutral lepton kinetic terms Created 2026-10-14 Updated 2026-10-20
If a chiral fermion triplet uses one normalized linear combination of two neutral leptons, adding the perpendicular combination as a gauge singlet completes their canonical kinetic terms. The two combinations are related to the original fields by a real orthogonal matrix. Hence their summed kinetic quadratic form is exactly that of the two original fields, with no mixed terms. The singlet carries the same chirality; no right-handed component is created for a purely left-handed massless neutrino.
A bare Dirac mass couples left and right chirality, so the distinct electroweak representations prevent writing it as a gauge-invariant term before symmetry breaking. Instead the Yukawa interactions are
Weak indices are contracted to singlets. Substituting the vacuum value gives mass matrices and a physical Higgs coupling plus its conjugate. Biunitary diagonalization defines mass eigenstates; a mismatch between the up- and down-quark left rotations appears in the CKM matrix. Gauge-boson masses arise from the Higgs kinetic term, whereas these fermion masses arise from the Yukawa term.
With only the minimal field content there is no right-handed neutrino, so no renormalizable neutrino Yukawa term. Adding a gauge-singlet permits both a Dirac scale and a Majorana scale . For one family the symmetric mass matrix in a left-chiral basis is
Its signed eigenvalues are . Rephasing gives positive physical masses, and for the seesaw mechanism yields
For and , the light scale is about . Integrating out the heavy state generates the dimension-five Weinberg operator, whose Higgs vacuum insertion gives the same suppression. Alternatively a Dirac neutrino can have a very small Yukawa coupling with lepton number conserved. A tiny observed neutrino mass does not by itself distinguish these mechanisms.
The SU(5) grand unified theory embeds the strong and electroweak groups in a single simple gauge group. Its 24 gauge generators contain the eight gluons, three weak generators and one hypercharge generator, plus twelve additional generators connecting color and weak directions. A common gauge coupling applies at the unification scale with the properly normalized hypercharge generator; low-energy couplings differ through their renormalization group evolution.
Using left-chiral fields throughout, one Standard Model generation fits into
The dimensions are and , so no right-handed neutrino is required in these multiplets. A singlet neutrino can be added. A suitable adjoint scalar vacuum breaks SU(5) to the Standard Model subgroup; a fundamental scalar contains an electroweak doublet and a colored triplet. The extra heavy vector bosons can mediate transitions between quarks and leptons, hence proton decay in the minimal model. This is a proposed unification, not an experimentally established identification of new particles.
The hierarchy problem concerns keeping an elementary weak-scale scalar light in the presence of much heavier physical scales. A heavy state coupled to it generically induces a threshold correction of order , with a product of couplings. Without protection, a weak-scale result then needs cancellation against a much larger parameter. In SU(5), this is sharpened by doublet-triplet splitting: the electroweak doublet must stay light while its colored partner must be sufficiently heavy to avoid rapid proton decay. Choosing a small tree-level doublet mass is not by itself a mechanism protecting it from subsequent heavy-particle corrections. Supersymmetry and other proposals change this protection problem, but the minimal SU(5) embedding alone does not solve it.
For the usual colour SU(3) fixing the fourth coordinate of the SU(4) defining representation,
Taking the exterior square gives
The identification follows by contracting an antisymmetric tensor with the invariant three-index Levi-Civita symbol. Combining this with c gives all colour multiplets:
A colour triplet has the color charge transformation law of a quark, an antitriplet that of an antiquark, and a colour singlet is colour-neutral, as a lepton is. Thus both parent representations permit quark-like and antiquark-like colour sectors; the vector has one neutral sector and the spinor two. These are colour assignments only. They do not determine particle spin, statistics, electric charge, weak quantum numbers or a full generation of the Standard Model. In a real parent field the conjugate colour sectors may describe one complex colour field and its conjugate, rather than independent particle species.
Global group qualification. The printed chain is correct at the Lie algebra level, . Globally its simply connected form is . The standard map of SU(4) into through has a nontrivial kernel: the concrete central element acts as on and trivially on the singlet representation. Its image is , rather than an injective copy of SU(4) under this map.
The global form obstruction for the Spin7 spinor is explicit: the central element of the Spin group maps to the identity in but acts as on the eight-dimensional spin representation. Equivalently acts as on both and in its restriction. Therefore the spinor does not descend to a genuine SO(7) group representation. A theory containing that spinor needs the Spin group global form, or must understand the source's notation as specifying only its Lie algebra. The displayed colour branchings remain valid with this correction.
The commuting direction in solution provides the correct candidate Lie algebra for a gauge group, . This is a necessary structural condition for the Standard Model, but it does not by itself establish a viable grand unified theory.
The representations in solution do not give a Standard Model fermion generation with the correct weak hypercharges. Use . Identifying with the left-handed quark doublet, whose weak hypercharge is , fixes . But then the doublet in has , whereas the left-handed lepton doublet requires . Its singlet has , whereas a right-handed electron requires . The is a further concrete mismatch: right-handed quarks written as left-handed antiquarks require or , and a rescaling cannot turn zero into either value. These comparisons use the electroweak representation and hypercharge table.
The charge- doublet in does have the required lepton weak hypercharge under this normalization, but the same Adjoint representation also brings a doublet of the opposite charge and an extra triplet. Therefore merely adding that representation does not supply the missing chiral generation without additional states and a mechanism for their masses.
Furthermore is a product of two Simple Lie groups, permitting two independent gauge couplings; it does not enforce a common strong and electroweak gauge coupling. Thus the embedding exists, but the displayed matter content does not furnish a viable minimal unification of the Standard Model. A more elaborate model would require additional representations, consistent chiral matter, anomaly cancellation, and a specified spontaneous symmetry breaking mechanism. The calculations here do not prove that every possible extension using this product group is impossible.
Use the current convention in the question, whose vertex prefactor is . The neutral-current vector and axial couplings are then
For a charged lepton, , , giving
For an active neutrino, , , so . The right-handed weak singlet contribution is purely vectorlike in the charge term; combining it with the left-handed contribution gives precisely this Dirac-current form. These coefficients would be halved if the vertex prefactor were instead.
Let be the Z boson momentum and the outgoing massless lepton momenta. The decay amplitude is
Use the fermion spin sums and . Anticommutation of with the Dirac gamma matrices gives the symmetric part of the trace,
The vector-axial cross term is antisymmetric in , and hence drops out of the massive vector polarization sum. The massless equations also give : in the symmetric part, the first two contractions sum to , canceling the last; the antisymmetric term vanishes because . The longitudinal term therefore makes no contribution.
Since , contraction with gives . Thus the massless fermion Z decay spin sum, including all three initial polarizations, is
To use this fully summed expression for the decay width of one unpolarized Z boson, apply the massive-vector spin average, dividing by three. The width of each fixed polarization is the same after integration over all directions, so that procedure also gives the physical single-particle width. Omitting the division would sum the widths of three initial states.
For two massless distinguishable final particles, the two-body Lorentz-invariant phase space is
Consequently
The tree-level electroweak symmetry breaking relation is . Combining it with the Fermi constant normalization gives
For an active neutrino, the vertex itself projects out inactive chiralities, so no additional helicity factor is needed. This is the tree-level massless leptonic Z decay width; lepton masses and radiative corrections have been excluded.
Use the electroweak hypercharge normalization , rather than . In the latter convention all tabulated hypercharges would be doubled. The electroweak representation and hypercharge table for one minimal Standard Model generation is
The quarks are colour triplets, the leptons are colour singlets, and all listed right-handed fields are weak singlets. A sterile right-handed neutrino, if added, has representation and changes none of the anomaly traces.
On each left weak doublet, . The electric charges are therefore for and for . On each right singlet , so its electric charge equals its hypercharge. These are the observed quark and lepton charge assignments.
For Standard Model anomaly cancellation, traces must include both components of each doublet and all three colours. Every right weak singlet has , giving
On the left doublets, , while separately in each doublet. Consequently
The linear trace is
Equivalently, . This proves cancellation of the mixed weak-hypercharge gauge anomaly within one generation.
The one-generation hypercharge anomaly traces for the cubic condition are
Thus both required anomaly differences vanish generation by generation. The right-handed subtraction is important: counting all physical fields with the same chirality sign would not give the cubic cancellation.
Use and . For each generation , the leptons are
Both are color singlets. The conjugate antilepton fields transform in the conjugate representations and have opposite hypercharge; they are already included by the conjugate fields in the Lagrangian. The two components of have electric charges , and has charge . There is no right-handed neutrino representation in this field content. These assignments use the electroweak representation and hypercharge table in the same hypercharge normalization as the scalar doublet.
For a doublet of hypercharge , define
The term is absent for a singlet. Under the local transformation , the gauge fields transform so that . Consequently the required gauge-covariant kinetic terms are
The fields of definite chirality are defined with . Since has hypercharge , the Yukawa interaction
is invariant: its hypercharges add to zero, and contracts the two doublet indices. A bare charged-lepton mass violates these assignments. No renormalizable neutrino Yukawa term is available without a right-handed neutrino. A gauge-invariant scalar potential depending on can select the nonzero vacuum, without altering these kinetic and Yukawa constructions.
There is an explicit local unitary gauge transformation whenever :
Thus, with the real field ,
This proves the polar coordinates for the electroweak Higgs doublet constructively. The gauge choice is local about the nonzero vacuum; it need not be nonsingular at zeros of the doublet.
The three identical-generation kinetic terms permit unitary flavor changes. A singular value decomposition gives with . Rotate both components of each left doublet together, and the right singlets independently. In this basis,
The left/right cross terms combine into this Dirac mass. Since the neutrinos have no mass matrix, their simultaneous left rotation preserves a diagonal charged current. This is charged-lepton Yukawa matrix diagonalization; the neutrinos remain massless in the stated renormalizable model.
The scalar kinetic term gives
Introduce and . The combinations , , and therefore diagonalize the quadratic terms:
The factor applies to the real neutral field, not to the complex charged field. The massless photon corresponds to the unbroken generator , which annihilates the vacuum. This gives the electroweak doublet gauge-boson mass matrix and its diagonal spectrum.
Assume and . The minima of the scalar potential have . Choose the vacuum expectation value . Its stabilizer subgroup consists exactly of matrices with , so
The continuous spontaneous symmetry breaking is and has two broken generators. For the full orthogonal group, the cross-product notation requires the gauge connection to transform in the adjoint, as an axial vector: . The scalar field transforms as the ordinary vector . This axial transformation of orthogonal gauge connections makes the stated covariant derivative transform correctly even for ; assigning an ordinary-vector transformation to the connection would fail.
Near this nonzero vacuum, unitary gauge removes the two angular Goldstone bosons and gives . Put
These are the physical charged gauge bosons, neutral massless gauge boson, and radial scalar field. Directly substituting into the original gauge field strengths gives
The scalar field kinetic term has no radial-vector cross term, because and lie in perpendicular internal directions. The complete physical gauge-scalar Lagrangian becomes
For each real vector the mass term is , while for the complex pair it is . Hence the adjoint triplet Higgs spectrum is
The radial scalar also has in the question's potential normalization. The two lost scalar modes supply the longitudinal polarizations of the massive vectors through the Higgs mechanism.
For the lepton kinetic terms let , , and denote the left neutral triplet entry by . The missing singlet is the perpendicular combination
Its overall sign is immaterial. The real orthogonal matrix is orthogonal, so the sum of the kinetic terms of and is with no mixed terms. Combining with the right triplet gives ordinary Dirac field kinetic terms for , and only a left-handed kinetic term for the massless neutrino. This is orthogonal completion of mixed neutral lepton kinetic terms. The heavy charged field is , as printed in the PDF, not the TeX's .
To compute the charge commutator, the canonical anticommutation relations imply
The quartic terms cancel on reordering the fermions. Thus well-defined normal-ordered integrated bilinears obey fermionic bilinear charge algebra, . Left/right mixed commutators vanish since .
In either triplet, write
The displayed current has a factor two relative to the projected bilinears, since . Consequently its charges are and . The neutral combinations have canonical anticommutators because . Applying the matrix commutator gives
where is the electromagnetic charge in the lepton sector. The neutrino, heavy neutral lepton and singlet contribute zero. This establishes triplet charged-current closure on electromagnetic charge, with the requested proportionality independent of normalization choices for the weak Noether charges. The PDF correctly writes ; the TeX repeats incorrectly. Equal-time algebra does not require conservation of the separate fermionic weak currents after symmetry breaking. For full gauge-theory charges, the corresponding charged-boson contributions must also be included.
Use the source convention , with electric charge measured in units of the positron charge. Expanding the covariant derivative in the fermion kinetic term gives interaction . Substituting the given neutral-field rotation, the coefficient of is
The photon coefficient is , with . For a Dirac field, acts only on its left-handed component. Thus
The weak neutral current interaction consequently has the requested form, with
The electroweak representation and hypercharge table gives the following values for one generation:
Type on left
Neutrinoabsent
Charged lepton
Up-type quark
Down-type quark
These neutral-current vector and axial couplings use the source's vertex prefactor . They are twice the coefficients used with prefactor ; the latter convention must not be mixed into this calculation. For the neutrino, the chiral projector removes the inactive right-handed component automatically.
Set and suppress the species label. For outgoing momenta , the amplitude is, up to an irrelevant phase,
The final-state spin sum is the Dirac trace of . Anticommutation of with the gamma matrices makes its symmetric part
The vector-axial cross term is proportional to the antisymmetric Levi-Civita symbol, so it contracts to zero with the symmetric massive vector polarization sum . Since , the symmetric tensor is transverse to as well. Only remains, and
Multiplying by proves the massless fermion Z decay spin sum:
For the decay width, average over the three initial polarizations. Rotational invariance makes the integrated width the same for each initial spin state, so the massive-vector spin average is legitimate even for a single prepared polarization. In the rest frame, the delta functions in two-body Lorentz-invariant phase space leave
This follows by setting and integrating ; the radial integration supplies a factor . Hence
For a quark species multiply by three colors, with strong-interaction radiative corrections when comparing with data. For one effectively massless active neutrino, , so .
The total resonance width contains visible charged-lepton and hadron decays plus . Thus the measured invisible contribution determines
Early resonance measurements supported three light active neutrino species, with experimental uncertainties; the OPAL analysis of its 1989 data explicitly compares the three- and four-species predictions. Under the question's assumption that every possible family has a massless neutrino with ordinary weak couplings, this constrains the number of such families. The inference does not exclude additional neutrinos heavier than or gauge singlet sterile states with no ordinary coupling. This is light-neutrino counting from the Z width.
Let , so . Direct multiplication of the Pauli matrices gives , equivalently . For this implies
Therefore transforms as the same weak fundamental representation doublet as , while complex conjugation reverses its hypercharge to . This is the Higgs conjugate doublet. The Yukawa coupling product is an singlet, and its hypercharges add to
It is consequently gauge-invariant and can supply an up-quark mass.
In unitary gauge, . Writing for the full arbitrary coefficient of the Yukawa coupling term, its physical form is
A one-generation field rephasing makes the mass positive, and its Higgs boson coupling is . The printed Yukawa expression has an additional trailing after which is never defined. If it denotes a constant, absorb it into ; in the conventional dimensionless Yukawa notation without that factor, . It does not affect the gauge-transformation argument.
For three families, use a singular value decomposition of the two mass matrices: and , with positive diagonal entries. The original left-handed weak current then becomes a current between mass eigenstates with
A complex matrix has eighteen real parameters, and imposes nine independent real conditions, leaving nine. A generic unitary matrix can be built from three complex plane rotations and three diagonal phases: each plane rotation supplies one angle and one phase. Thus these are three rotation angles and six phases. Rephase each of the six Dirac quark mass eigenfields, applying the same phase to its two chiralities so the diagonal masses stay real. A common phase changes no entry of , leaving five effective rephasings. Removing five of the six phases leaves three angles and one physical phase. This CKM parameter counting assumes generic nondegenerate masses; degeneracies give additional basis freedom.
Exactly massless neutrinos have an arbitrary unitary flavor rotation that changes no mass term. After diagonalizing the charged-lepton mass matrix, choose the neutrino basis with the same left-handed rotation. The apparent lepton charged-current mixing matrix becomes the identity. Thus mixing of exactly massless neutrinos is removable; it is not an analogue of physical CKM mixing.
For the requested CP symmetry calculation, write . The supplied charge conjugation transformations, with the fermion-reordering sign, give
For , use and the given gamma matrix relation to obtain
Under parity, the current acquires the Lorentz parity matrix and becomes . Under charge conjugation the charged vector also changes sign and becomes its conjugate. The two minus signs cancel, and the parity matrices cancel in the contracted operator. Consequently
With , the interaction is . Therefore
with the transformed density evaluated at . This is the CP transformation of a charged quark current.
Physical noninvariance requires a phase that cannot be removed by quark rephasings. The invariant quartet
is the Jarlskog invariant, where and in the standard three-angle parametrization. If , no allowed row/column phases can make the matrix real, and the charged-current interaction violates CP symmetry. For example all three angles with give .
The printed noninvariance claim is conditional on a nonzero physical phase. Arbitrary Yukawa matrices do not force it: , or any real CKM matrix, gives a CP-invariant charged-current interaction. The correct statement is generic CP violation when the irreducible phase is nontrivial, as explained by quark rephasing and CP conservation.
Finally a right-handed neutrino has gauge representation . Its Lorentz-invariant same-chirality bilinear with the field obtained by charge conjugation is therefore a gauge singlet and permits a Majorana mass term, conventionally
The factor is the usual convention for a field paired with itself; it may be absorbed into the printed coefficient. A Higgs Yukawa interaction can independently give a Dirac mass term. The Majorana term violates lepton number by two units but preserves the gauge symmetries. Corresponding terms for the other charged Standard Model fermions carry nonzero electric charge, and quarks also carry nontrivial color charge. Thus this gauge-invariant right-handed neutrino Majorana mass is allowed while those charged-fermion analogues are forbidden. Merely introducing a right-handed neutrino permits mass; vanishing mass coefficients would still leave it massless.
The derivative convention uses hypercharge Y with . For each lepton family , the left-handed fields form an SU(2) doublet , with . Their weak isospin values are and their electric charges are . The right-handed charged lepton is an SU(2) singlet, with , and charge . The minimal model used here has no right-handed neutrino. A sterile right-handed neutrino, if added as a singlet with , would have no charged weak current interaction. Antiparticles carry the conjugate representations and opposite electric charges.
Expanding supplies . The off-diagonal entries of are and . With the chiral projector , one has . Thus the two W boson interactions are
For quarks, separate rotations diagonalize the up-type and down-type mass terms. If their left-handed rotations are and , the charged interaction contains the CKM matrix :
There is an implicit sum over color charge. This quark mixing permits transitions between different families, rather than just the paired fields in a single doublet.
Let and . At momenta much smaller than , neglect derivatives in the heavy W boson equation. Its mass and source terms can be completed to a square:
This explicitly performs integrating out a charged vector boson. The resulting Fermi interaction is
The omitted terms contain derivatives and are relatively suppressed by momentum squared divided by .
For the leptonic pion decay, Lorentz covariance restricts a vacuum-to-spin-zero current matrix element to a constant times . In the rest frame, rotations eliminate the spatial components. Under parity, the temporal vector current is even, whereas the vacuum is even and the pion is odd, so its temporal matrix element equals its negative and vanishes. The temporal axial current is odd and is allowed. This proves the vacuum-to-pseudoscalar current selection rule, rather than merely assuming an axial current. Define the pion decay constant by
Then the vector-minus-axial charged weak current has matrix element , up to an irrelevant overall phase convention. Consequently the scattering amplitude for the decay can be written
Use , the momentum-space Dirac equation , and for a massless neutrino. Since , the neutrino contribution vanishes, leaving
The fermion spin sum is, using the supplied gamma matrix trace identities,
Here , , and . The mass term in the trace vanishes; anticommuting reduces the remaining trace to twice . It follows that
Using two-body decay phase space, with final momentum magnitude , gives the leptonic pseudoscalar decay width
Thus the requested factor is already present in the squared amplitude, and the phase space supplies one more threshold factor.
The physical explanation is helicity suppression. In the pion rest frame the two momenta are opposite. The massless antineutrino has positive helicity; zero total angular momentum would require the electron to have positive helicity too. The charged weak current instead creates a left-chiral electron, whose helicity is negative when its mass vanishes. A nonzero electron mass admits the required opposite helicity with an amplitude proportional to . The decay amplitude vanishes for , and the rate is suppressed by .
Use left-chiral superfields throughout, abbreviating the conjugate singlets by , , and . The printed hypercharge convention is the negative of the usual one, so ; consequently is the down-type and the up-type Higgs doublet. Write for the weak-doublet contraction. Assign baryon number , , and lepton number , ; both Higgs fields have .
The baryon number and lepton number conserving homogeneous cubic superpotential is
Each term has zero hypercharge, is a color and weak singlet, and has . Higgs expectation values give the usual quark and charged-lepton Yukawa interaction masses and, here, Dirac neutrino masses. The complete remaining cubic part is
The first two terms have , the third has , the fourth has , and the last has . Their Hermitian conjugates reverse these signs. Commutativity of chiral superfields and the antisymmetric weak/color contractions give and ; can be taken completely symmetric. All other coupling tensors are unrestricted complex tensors.
To check completeness, a cubic color singlet containing a quark doublet and an antiquark singlet must contain a colorless weak doublet; the allowed hypercharges give , and . Three color-antitriplet singlets can form a singlet with , but hypercharge permits only . Three quark doublets cannot be a weak singlet. With no colored fields, an even number of weak doublets is necessary. Two doublets and a singlet give precisely , , and ; contractions of two identical Higgs superfields vanish. With no doublets the only neutral triple is . Thus is the most general homogeneous cubic superpotential for the printed fields, including their singlet neutrinos.
If “cubic” is intended to mean a polynomial of degree at most three, also add
The term conserves both charges; the other nonconstant terms have respectively . This distinction will matter for the printed claim about R-parity.
For squark-mediated proton decay, choose and with or . The same down-type singlet squark can appear in both vertices; would give by antisymmetry. The first term includes an electron/up-quark/squark vertex, and the second an up-quark/down-quark/squark vertex. Exchanging a squark of mass and expanding its propagator at momenta much smaller than produces the dimension-six effective operator
The left- and right-handed pairs are separately contracted spinor bilinears. This operator converts an up/down quark pair into a positron and an antiquark; the spectator up quark can combine with the antiquark into the neutral pion. Equivalently its hadronic matrix element between a proton and a pion is permitted, so it induces . Having both the baryon number and lepton number violating vertices is what enables this channel.
Since has mass dimension , dimensional analysis gives
The dimensionless includes the hadronic matrix element and two-body phase space; the pion mass changes this factor rather than the leading dimensions. Dimensional grounds alone do not give a precise hadronic coefficient. Using the lifetime supplied in the paper, rather than substituting a different bound, gives and hence
For an illustrative squark this is about when is rounded to . The bound constrains the relevant flavour product and depends on the exchanged mass; separate smallness of each coupling does not follow without an additional assumption.
Define matter parity and R-parity by
Every matter superfield has , whereas and the vector superfields have . For ordinary quarks and antiquarks, is odd and , so . For charged leptons, neutrinos and their antiparticles, is odd and , again giving ; the singlet neutrino fermion obeys the same rule. Gluons, the photon, and have and spin one, hence ; Higgs bosons have and also . Thus every Standard Model particle is R-even, including the corresponding antiparticles. Changing spin by one half within a supermultiplet reverses , so squarks, sleptons, gauginos and Higgsinos are R-odd.
Each conserving cubic term contains two R-odd matter superfields and one even Higgs superfield, so it is even under matter parity. Each term in has an odd number of matter superfields: three for , and one for . All are therefore forbidden. At the component level the two fermion spin factors in a Yukawa interaction multiply to , so the same selection rule follows directly from R-parity. This verifies all cubic baryon/lepton-number violating terms are forbidden while the Yukawa fermion mass terms survive.
The blanket assertion needs a qualification beyond homogeneous cubic terms. The Higgs term is even; and are odd and forbidden. But is even and permits a Majorana neutrino mass despite violating lepton number by two. Likewise the higher-dimensional operators and are even. Consequently R-parity alone does not enforce all-order conservation of baryon number and lepton number, or absolute proton stability; the stated precise exclusion holds for the violating cubic interactions above.
Two physical implications follow from multiplicative conservation of R-parity. Superpartners are produced in even numbers from an initial state consisting only of Standard Model particles, leading to pair production at the lowest threshold and parity-conserving cascades. The lightest supersymmetric particle is stable, since one R-odd particle cannot decay exclusively into R-even particles and no lighter R-odd state is available. A neutral weakly interacting lightest supersymmetric particle can therefore be a dark-matter candidate and produce missing-energy signatures; neutrality and a suitable abundance require further model assumptions.
Count one neutrino species as the usual two thermally populated particle-antiparticle helicity states, with negligible chemical potential. Its entropy weight is . In the ideal high-temperature Standard Model, the bosonic count is from gluons, electroweak gauge bosons and the Higgs field. The fermionic count is from quarks, charged leptons and the three ordinary neutrino species. Hence the relativistic entropy content of the Standard Model is for the remaining bath. Before the new species leaves, the total count is ; its separately cooling states are excluded from the subsequent bath count.
Near ordinary neutrino decoupling, the still-coupled bath has
from photons, electron-positron pairs and the three ordinary neutrinos. After those neutrinos decouple, the electromagnetic bath falls from to two when the pairs annihilate. Cosmological entropy conservation in that bath gives .
The new species has cooled as since its earlier decoupling, whereas annihilation of Standard Model species heated the remaining bath. The temperature ratio of an early-decoupled neutrino is thus
These are ideal-gas estimates with the high-temperature count implicit in the question; precise electroweak thresholds change them slightly.
Entropy degrees of freedom weight temperature ratios with their cube, while energy degrees of freedom use their fourth power. The remaining Standard Model entropy today, in photon-temperature units, is . The new contribution is . Therefore the fractional entropy of a relativistically decoupled species is
About 1.6% of the total entropy is in the new species. Separate comoving entropy conservation also derives this fraction directly at decoupling. A model populating four helicity states instead would require the corresponding doubled species count.