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The helicity of a particle is positive (" right-handed") if the direction of its spin is the same as the direction of its motion and negative ("left-handed") if opposite. Helicity is conserved. [1] That is, the helicity commutes with the Hamiltonian, and thus, in the absence of external forces, is time-invariant. It is also rotationally ...
Mathematically, helicity is the sign of the projection of the spin vector onto the momentum vector: "left" is negative, "right" is positive. The chirality of a particle is more abstract: It is determined by whether the particle transforms in a right- or left-handed representation of the Poincaré group. [a]
Helicity is a pseudo-scalar quantity: it changes sign under change from a right-handed to a left-handed frame of reference; it can be considered as a measure of the handedness (or chirality) of the flow. Helicity is one of the four known integral invariants of the Euler equations; the other three are energy, momentum and angular momentum.
In particular for a massless particle the helicity is the same as the chirality while for an antiparticle they have opposite sign. The handedness in both chirality and helicity relate to the rotation of a particle while it proceeds in linear motion with reference to the human hands. The thumb of the hand points towards the direction of linear ...
The field equations of condensed matter physics are remarkably similar to those of high energy particle physics. As a result, much of the theory of particle physics applies to condensed matter physics as well; in particular, there are a selection of field excitations, called quasi-particles, that can be created and explored. These include:
where p is the momentum operator, S the spin operator for a particle of spin s, E is the total energy of the particle, and m 0 its rest mass. Helicity indicates the orientations of the spin and translational momentum vectors. [29] Helicity is frame-dependent because of the 3-momentum in the definition, and is quantized due to spin quantization ...
Particle physics or high-energy physics is the study of fundamental particles and forces that constitute matter and radiation. The field also studies combinations of elementary particles up to the scale of protons and neutrons , while the study of combination of protons and neutrons is called nuclear physics .
The neutrino [a] was postulated first by Wolfgang Pauli in 1930 to explain how beta decay could conserve energy, momentum, and angular momentum ().In contrast to Niels Bohr, who proposed a statistical version of the conservation laws to explain the observed continuous energy spectra in beta decay, Pauli hypothesized an undetected particle that he called a "neutron", using the same -on ending ...