Helicity, Chirality, and Parity Violation

[shirosato]

Hello all,

This is something that has irked me for a while. The Li/Yang/Wu beta decay showed parity violation in the weak force, but from what I gather, it was the helicities of the electrons they measured, while it is the chiral states which are important. For a massive fermion, aren't the chiral states superpositions of the helicity states and vice-versa? How exactly did they deduce that the electroweak force is chiral?

 

[Vanadium 50]

Did you read their paper?

 

[shirosato]

The reference griffiths gives is:

http://prola.aps.org/pdf/PR/v105/i4/p1413_1 ,

which doesn't seem to answer my question, unless I am missing something.

 

[Vanadium 50]

See reference 1. Note that they don't even need to introduce chirality until the appendix.