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To see an in depth discussion of the two with examples, which also shows how chirality and helicity approach the same thing as speed approaches that of light, click the link entitled "Chirality and Helicity in Depth" on the same page. History of science: parity violation; Helicity, Chirality, Mass, and the Higgs (Quantum Diaries blog)
An object that is not chiral is said to be achiral. A chiral object and its mirror image are said to be enantiomorphs. The word chirality is derived from the Greek χείρ (cheir), the hand, the most familiar chiral object; the word enantiomorph stems from the Greek ἐναντίος (enantios) 'opposite' + μορφή (morphe) 'form'.
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 ...
Consider, for example, a baseball, pitched as a gyroball, so that its spin axis is aligned with the direction of the pitch. It will have one helicity with respect to the point of view of the players on the field, but would appear to have a flipped helicity in any frame moving faster than the ball.
The chirality of a molecule that has a helical, propeller, or screw-shaped geometry is called helicity [5] or helical chirality. [6] [7] The screw axis or the D n, or C n principle symmetry axis is considered to be the axis of chirality. Some sources consider helical chirality to be a type of axial chirality, [7] and some do not.
Helicity is the projection (dot product) of a spin pseudovector onto the direction of momentum (a true vector). Pseudoscalar particles, i.e. particles with spin 0 and odd parity, that is, a particle with no intrinsic spin with wave function that changes sign under parity inversion. Examples are pseudoscalar mesons.
(See Chirality (physics) § Chirality and helicity for the difference.) Chirality is a fundamental property of particles and is relativistically invariant: It is the same regardless of the particle's speed and mass in every inertial reference frame. [12]
For the Pauli group, the chiral element is = whereas for the gamma group ,, one cannot deduce any such relationship for other than that it squares to . This is an example of where a representation may have more identities than the represented group.