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An energetically allowed weak nuclear transition converts a proton into a neutron, emitting a positron and electron neutrino. Positron annihilation deposits additional electromagnetic energy, while the neutrino can escape. These transitions are steps of the CNO cycle and the pp III branch; an isolated free proton cannot undergo this decay.

A singular value decomposition of the charged-lepton Yukawa matrix uses independent unitary rotations of left- and right-handed leptons. Their gauge-covariant kinetic terms are unchanged because each rotation mixes identical Standard Model representations. After electroweak symmetry breaking, the nonnegative singular values give Dirac masses $m_i=y_{i}v/\sqrt{2}$ and diagonal Higgs boson couplings $m_i/v$. When the neutrinos are massless, rotating their left-handed fields with the charged partners preserves the diagonal weak charged current.

A branch of the CNO cycle proceeds through proton captures on nitrogen-15 and oxygen-16, beta-plus decay of fluorine-17, and ${}^{17}\mathrm{O}(p,\alpha ){}^{14}\mathrm{N}$. Returning through oxygen-15 and nitrogen-15 closes the cycle. It also catalyzes the conversion of four protons into helium-4, with branch-dependent neutrino loss.

A standard thermal Cosmic neutrino background with one populated neutrino and one antineutrino helicity per species has $n_{\nu }+n_{\bar{\nu }}=3n_{\gamma }/11$ after electron-positron annihilation in cosmology. If this species is nonrelativistic today and dominates a spatially flat matter universe, equate $m_{\nu }(n_{\nu }+n_{\bar{\nu }})$ to the critical density $3H_0^2{M}_P^2/(8\pi )$, using the unreduced Planck mass. The photon number density gives the displayed conditional mass. Extra populated states or several massive species change the abundance count; vacuum-dominated cosmology changes the density available for matter.

For one massless neutrino flavor with one helicity per member and $|{\mu }_{\nu }|\gg T_{\nu }$, the Fermi-Dirac distribution fills momentum states up to the positive chemical potential. If ${\mu }_{\nu }>0$, the neutrino density is ${\mu }_{\nu }^4/(8{\pi }^2)$ and the antineutrino contribution is approximately $3T_{\nu }^4{e}^{-{\mu }_{\nu }/T_{\nu }}/{\pi }^2$. For negative chemical potential the roles reverse. Thus the leading total energy density is even in ${\mu }_{\nu }$ and has no factor of two from the two species. Extra populated internal degrees of freedom do multiply it. This distinction prevents using a positive-degeneracy approximation for an exponentially dilute negative-chemical-potential distribution.

A nucleus can capture an electron when energetically allowed, converting a proton into a neutron and emitting an electron neutrino. Beryllium-7 electron capture participates in one of the proton-proton chain branches. Stellar capture rates depend on ionization, mass density and electron phase space.

A spin-zero parent decaying through a chiral weak charged current to a charged lepton and a massless neutrino cannot supply the helicities selected by a massless interaction. A charged-lepton mass insertion makes the amplitude proportional to $m_{\ell }$ and the decay width proportional to $m_{\ell }^2$. A spin-one W boson does not suffer this suppression.

A lepton is a Standard Model fermion without color charge. The charged leptons have electric charge $-1$ and their corresponding neutrinos have charge zero. There are three generations; their antiparticles carry opposite electric charge and lepton number. Charged leptons and neutrinos have lepton number $+1$, with the corresponding antiparticles carrying $-1$.

Each effectively massless active neutrino species contributes the same invisible Z boson partial decay width. Subtracting calculated or measured visible widths from the total width therefore measures the displayed number, assuming no additional invisible channels. The inference concerns particles lighter than $M_Z/2$ with ordinary weak couplings. It does not exclude heavier neutrinos or right-handed neutrinos that are gauge singlets. Early LEP resonance measurements were consistent with three light active species, with statistical uncertainty. See the OPAL report on its 1989 data for the original resonance-width comparison.

For a vertex $(g/c_W){\gamma }^{\mu }(c_V-c_A{\gamma }^5)$ into one massless color-singlet particle-antiparticle pair, the massive-vector spin average and two-body Lorentz-invariant phase space give $\Gamma =g^2{m}_Z(c_V^2+c_A^2)/(12\pi c_W^2)$. With Standard Model neutral-current vector and axial couplings, one neutrino flavor has ${\Gamma }_{\nu }=g^2{m}_Z/(96\pi c_W^2)$ and one charged-lepton flavor has ${\Gamma }_{\ell }={\Gamma }_{\nu }(1-4s_W^2+8s_W^4)$. Chiral projectors already remove inactive neutrino helicities. These are tree-level massless results.

If all neutrinos are exactly massless, arbitrary unitary rotations among them preserve both their kinetic terms and their zero mass matrix. After diagonalizing the charged-lepton Yukawa matrix, choose the neutrino basis to coincide with that rotation. The resulting weak charged current has no physical lepton mixing matrix. With nondegenerate neutrino masses this extra basis freedom is lost, permitting observable neutrino oscillations and lepton mixing.

If a neutral-current vertex has prefactor $g/\cos {\theta }_W$ and chiral coefficients $g_L,g_R$, then $g_L{P}_L+g_R{P}_R=c_V-c_A{\gamma }^5$, with $c_V=(g_L+g_R)/2$ and $c_A=(g_L-g_R)/2$. For one Standard Model charged lepton, $(c_V,c_A)=(-1/4+{\sin }^2{\theta }_W,-1/4)$; for an active neutrino, $(c_V,c_A)=(1/4,1/4)$. A prefactor $g/(2\cos {\theta }_W)$ instead requires doubled coefficients. Mixing these conventions creates a factor-of-four error in squared amplitudes.

For massless collisionless neutrinos in Newtonian gauge in cosmology, expand their temperature fluctuation as $\Theta (\mu )={\sum }_{\ell \ge 0}(-i{)}^{\ell }{\Theta }_{\ell }{P}_{\ell }(\mu )$, without a $(2\ell +1)$ factor. The Legendre polynomial recurrence relation givesThe lower-neighbour term is absent at $\ell =0$. Multipoles with the more usual $(2\ell +1)$ weighting equal ${\Theta }_{\ell }/(2\ell +1)$.

For a massless neutrino scattering on an unpolarized up antiquark through the Fermi interaction, $d\sigma /dy=G_F^{2}s(1-y{)}^2/\pi$. The corresponding down-quark channel has $d\sigma /dy=G_F^{2}s/\pi$. Their difference follows from the chiral weak-current trace contraction. The parton distribution functions weight these rates in a hadron.

For massless neutrinos with a temperature perturbation $\Theta$ and background energy density ${\bar{\rho }}_{\nu }$, the physical trace-free spatial stress-energy tensor isSome conventions define ${\Pi }^{ij}=-{\pi }_{\nu }^{ij}$ and correspondingly reverse the sign of the stress source in the gravitational-wave equation.

Projecting free-streaming neutrinos onto the tensor spherical harmonic givesHere $j_2$ is a Spherical Bessel function. The continuous value at zero follows by integrating $(1-{\mu }^2{)}^2$, whose integral is $16/15$.

With negligible chemical potential, the Fermi-Dirac distribution has $3/4$ of the boson number density per degree of freedom at equal temperature. A species with $g_{\nu }$ populated states therefore has $n_{\nu }/n_{\gamma }=(3g_{\nu }/8)(T_{\nu }/T_{\gamma }{)}^3$, since photons have two states. This remains the number-density ratio after the neutrino becomes massive if its comoving particle number is conserved.