Past exam of the mathematics course of the University of Cambridge 2002 iii Paper 66 2 Solution Created 2026-10-03 Updated 2026-10-14
Take metric and write . The outgoing electron and antineutrino momenta are and . Up to an irrelevant overall phase, the amplitude isA fermion spin sum givesAnticommuting through the massless momentum and gamma matrix, and using , reduces the trace to twice the four-gamma trace minus twice its counterpart. In particular its symmetric part isThe epsilon-tensor part is antisymmetric and contributes neither to the unpolarized polarization sum nor to the real linear polarization used below. There is no extra factor for selecting the neutrino helicity: the chiral vertex has already done so.
The external massless equations imply for , so . With , averaging over the three initial spin states givesIndeed . This is a massive-vector spin average, not an average over the final spins.
In the rest frame, eliminating the momentum delta function and integrating the remaining radial delta function reduces the two-body Lorentz-invariant phase space to . ThereforeThis derives the massless leptonic W decay width without invoking a precomputed decay formula.
For the specified polarization there is no initial spin average. Put , and . The contraction selectsIt follows thatHere . The total rate agrees with the spin-averaged result, but its normalized polar distribution is instead of the isotropic unpolarized distribution. This is polarized massless leptonic W decay.