Dirac Spinors Suck

[BenTheMan]

I think that anyone who has done a course in QFT has had their progress hampered by AT LEAST a month by Dirac Spinors. Why is it that the only sensible way to write the Standard Model down is to use Weyl Spinors, but the only sensible way to do calculations is to use Dirac spinors and projection operators?

Jesus, you'd think someone would come up with a way to do calculations with Weyl spinors...

Oh wait! Eureka! Someone has written this all down!

http://arxiv.org/abs/0812.1594

[malawi_glenn]

Thanx for the reference :-)

[blechman]

Now, now. While I am certainly a Weyl-spinor fan myself, there are some benefits to knowing both procedures.

Let me say that if you are working with a VECTORLIKE theory of fermions (QCD, QED,...) then you are MUCH better off working with Dirac spinors, they save you a great deal of time and trouble. Those of us (myself included) who work with CHIRAL theories of fermions (EW,BSM,...) would often find Weyl spinors much more convenient.

BTW: EXCELLENT reference, that paper! I know it's been in the works for several years now, I was very happy to see it finally published.

[mjsd]

Thanks Ben for alerting us to this paper!

I wish that it was around when I started grad school... would probably cleared up a lot of the issues I had with Majorana Neutrinos...