Majorana Neutrino: Chirality and Helicity

TL;DR

This paper introduces Majorana spinors in momentum space, explores their properties, and clarifies the distinctions between chirality and helicity for Majorana and Dirac states, highlighting their implications in quantum field theory.

Contribution

It presents a detailed formulation of Majorana spinors with eight components and clarifies the concepts of chirality and helicity in this context, addressing common confusions in the literature.

Findings

Majorana spinors obey a Dirac-like equation with eight components

The Fock space for Majorana fields is doubled

Clarification of chirality and helicity distinctions for Majorana and Dirac states

Abstract

We introduce the Majorana spinors in the momentum representation. They obey the Dirac-like equation with eight components, which has been first introduced by Markov. Thus, the Fock space for corresponding quantum fields is doubled (as shown by Ziino). The particular attention has been paid to the questions of chirality and helicity (two concepts which frequently are confused in the literature) for Dirac and Majorana states.