Neglect radiation, take , , and treat a fixed hadronic invariant mass as a single recoil system in . With negligible neutrino mass,
Thus , numerically approximately to . In the ultrarelativistic limit the range is . A spread of hadronic invariant masses broadens these endpoints; an average mass alone is not a strict endpoint specification for the whole sample.
Let denote a positive-helicity , and measure from its laboratory flight direction in its rest frame. For a spin-zero hadronic recoil, the left-helicity tau neutrino and angular momentum conservation give
For example a tau lepton with spin along can emit a left-helicity neutrino along , carrying spin along , with the spin-zero recoil along . A positive-helicity tau lepton then gives a harder visible recoil. If , and , the more general tau hadronic polarimetry formula is
For spin-zero recoil . For a spin-one system produced by the V-A interaction, the longitudinal and transverse weights are , with opposite angular slopes; summing gives . At this is about , so the negative-helicity tau lepton has the higher mean total hadronic energy, about versus , within that spin-one model. [ref]
The supplied mean invariant mass does not specify the recoil's spin composition or its helicity amplitudes. Consequently the last sign cannot be universal: positive helicity is harder for a spin-zero recoil, negative helicity is harder for the specified spin-one recoil, and a mixture requires its measured spectral weights. Polarization of an intermediate vector or axial-vector meson also changes the division of energy among its daughter hadrons; that information is not fixed by the total jet invariant mass alone.
Figure 1.
Chiral annihilation and tau lepton recoil energy distributions
. Original theoretical curves. Left: normalized pure-QED and illustrative Z-pole distributions for sin-squared weak angle 0.231. Right: spin-zero and spin-one recoil models at fixed hadronic mass 1.5 GeV; the opposite polarization slopes show why the spin assumption matters. These are not reconstructions of either damaged source graph. Details.