eys_physics said:
Hey
I have a basic question about the Standard Model. In this forum and on other places the expression left-/righthanded fermions. Can someone explain the difference between these two types of fermions.
It's a bit confusing at first because there are two concepts involved and people use the term right and left handed in two different contexts.
There is something called "chirality" and something called "helicity". Unfortunately, left and right handed is used to refer to eigenstates of chirality sometimes and of helicity sometimes.
The chirality operator is \gamma_5. You can define define positive and negative chirality fermions as the ones that are eigenstates of the chirality operator (it turns out that the eigenvalues are plus or minus 1)
\gamma_5 \Psi= \pm \Psi.
Those eigenstates are called left and right handed fermions unfortunately (because it has nothing to do with another concept of left and right associated to helicity..see below).
In general, a Dirac fermion is not a chirality eigenstate.
So, why should we care? We have to cae because the weak interaction couples the weak gauge bosons to chiral states! So we can't couple the weak gauge bosons directly to Dirac fermions.
However, one can always construct chiral eigenstates out of an arbitrary Dirac fermion by using what we call the projectors
P_\pm = (1 \pm \gamma_5)/2 .
Then, for any Dirac fermion \Psi,
the projection P_+ \Psi is automatically an eigenstate of the chirality operator with eigenvalue +1 ( check it! It's obvious if you use the fact that \gamma_5^2 = \gamma_5). And people call this a right-handed state so they write
\Psi_R = P_+ \Psi
Likewise, we can get a left-handed state using
\Psi_L = P_- \Psi
Helcity is a totally different concept. There is something called a helicity operator that measures the projection of the spin along the motion of the particle. The only states which are helicity eigenstates are massless states. It turns out that for a massless particle, the eigenstates of the helicity operator are the same as the eigenstates of the chirality operator which is probably why people use right-handed and left-handed in the two contexts.