Parity Violation in Weak Decay

[svrphy]

I just came across the following Quote in an introductory Quantum physics book"There are certain experiments in which behave differently in their mirror image form, this is called the Parity Violation in." Can anybody explain in detail what parity violation is and what mathematical description is used for it. I just had an introductory level course in Quantum Mechanics so Can this be a hard thing to understand mathematically ? I remember having possibly coming across something called a Right Handed Particle & a Left Handed Particle in this Context. Can anybody detail this as well (if my terminology is correct)

 

[mfb]

Parity and parity violation is too much to explain in detail in forum posts, books would be better.
A simple example of parity violation is the Wu experiment.

 

[jtbell]

Another description of Wu's experiment, with a couple of diagrams:

http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/quantum/parity.html

 

[andrien]

Can this be a hard thing to understand mathematically ? I remember having possibly coming across something called a Right Handed Particle & a Left Handed Particle

yes,it is hard to understand it mathematically.Parity is conserved with electromagnetic interaction but it is not the case with weak decay.The neutrinos for example in weak decay has a certain chirality i.e. neutrino and antineutrino comes with direction of spin opposite always in weak decay.So now it is possible to differentiate between a mirror image world and say real world.you can tell which hand is right and which is left.The mathematics of it has to do with some historical remarks which was used first by fermi to write an interaction hamiltonian for weak decay.After too many years it became accepted as V-A theory which does not conserve parity.it has property that it uses two component spinors which corresponds to a particular hand however it can be written in terms of 4 spinors