Charged current

The weak charged current couples a W boson to two members of a left-handed electroweak doublet. In the quark mass basis its flavor coefficients are entries of the Cabibbo-Kobayashi-Maskawa matrix.

The vector-minus-axial-vector charged weak current contains the left-chiral projector $P_L=(1-{\gamma }^5)/2$. It violates parity because parity interchanges left and right chiral fields. For a massless particle chirality fixes helicity, but a massive charged fermion's helicity need not be pure even when the vertex selects a chiral field. Nuclear beta decay uses the nonrelativistic reduction of vector and axial nucleon currents, giving Fermi and Gamow-Teller operators in the allowed limit.

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.

The Standard Model assigns the same gauge coupling to each lepton generation in the weak charged current. Different decay rates still arise from masses and phase space. Ratios of leptonic pion decay rates cancel the common hadronic decay constant and quark mixing coefficient, isolating universality and helicity suppression. Electromagnetic radiative corrections must be included for precision comparisons to inclusive measured decay rates.

The up-type and down-type fermion mass matrices need different left-handed transformations represented by unitary matrices to diagonalize them. Their relative transformation appears in the charged weak current as the Cabibbo-Kobayashi-Maskawa matrix. The weak neutral currents remain diagonal in the minimal Standard Model, since the same-charge couplings are generation-independent. Three nondegenerate generations give three mixing angles and one physical weak CP phase after quantum field rephasings.

For two outgoing massless leptons, ${\ell }_{\mu }=\bar{u}(q_1){\gamma }_{\mu }(1-{\gamma }^5)v(q_2)$ is transverse to $q=q_1+q_2$. This follows from the massless Dirac equation and anticommutation of the chirality matrix with the gamma matrices. Thus the $q^{\mu }{f}_{-}(q^2)$ term in a pseudoscalar-to-pseudoscalar form factor does not contribute to this scattering amplitude. A nonzero charged-lepton mass spoils exact transversality and restores a mass-suppressed scalar-form-factor contribution.

The weak charged current pairs each neutrino with its corresponding charged lepton. Thus elastic muon-neutrino/electron scattering has only tree-level neutral-current exchange, while electron-neutrino and electron-antineutrino scattering also have crossed and annihilation charged-current diagrams. A contact term pairing a muon neutrino directly with an electron would violate this Standard Model flavour assignment.

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 spin-zero parent at rest decaying to two particles requires their helicities to be equal. Choosing particle 1 along $+z$ and particle 2 along $-z$ gives total projection $J_z=h_1-h_2=0$. In negative-pion decay, the massless antineutrino has positive helicity, so the negative charged lepton must also have positive helicity. This is the suppressed component for a left-chiral weak charged current.

A spin-zero particle cannot decay into a spin-zero particle and one on-shell real photon. In the parent rest frame the two final helicities must be equal for total angular momentum zero, whereas the photon has helicity $\pm 1$ and the scalar has helicity zero. The prohibition is rotational and independent of charge-conjugation conservation. An off-shell photon producing additional particles is a different process.

For the massless contact interaction $-(G_F/\sqrt{2})[\bar{d}{\gamma }^{\alpha }(P+Q{\gamma }^5)u][\bar{c}{\gamma }_{\alpha }(P+Q{\gamma }^5)s]$ with real $P,Q$, spin and colour averaging givesThe gamma matrix trace identities give the averaged amplitude $4G_F^2[(C^2+4P^2{Q}^2)(p_2\cdot k_1)(p_1\cdot k_2)+(C^2-4P^2{Q}^2)(p_2\cdot k_2)(p_1\cdot k_1)]$, where $C=P^2+Q^2$. Substitute the massless Mandelstam variables and divide by $64{\pi }^{2}s$. The two singlet colour contractions give factor one after final summation and initial averaging. This is a low-energy Fermi interaction result, not its high-energy extrapolation.

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 momenta, define $T^{\alpha \beta }(a,b)=\mathrm{Tr}[/a{\gamma }^{\alpha }(1-{\gamma }^5)/b{\gamma }^{\beta }(1-{\gamma }^5)]$. The gamma matrix trace identities and the antisymmetric tensor contraction give $T^{\alpha \beta }(a,b)T_{\alpha \beta }(c,d)=256(a\cdot c)(b\cdot d)$. Reversing an antiquark's spinor order changes the momentum pairing and creates the $(1-y{)}^2$ angular factor in a weak charged-current quark scattering rate.

For the massless common vector-axial coupling at both vertices in weak charged-current quark scattering, subtracting opposite directions givesIt is undefined for $P=Q=0$. Overall rate normalization cancels. Pure vector or axial interactions have zero asymmetry, while $P=\pm Q$ gives its maximal coefficient. The inequality $4P^2{Q}^2\le (P^2+Q^2{)}^2$ implies $|A|\le 1$. This unpolarized observable does not distinguish purely left- from purely right-handed couplings applied at both vertices.