Does the concept of both helicity and chirality make sense for a massive Dirac spinor?
A massive electron in the chiral basis is written as a column made up of $\psi_L$ and $\psi_R$. What is the significance of this?
These cannot be decoupled from each other due to the presence of the mass term in the Dirac equation,
and we know electrons will look either left handed or right handed depending upon from which frame we are looking at them.
But what is then the meaning of $\psi_L$ and $\psi_R$ separately?
Best Answer
It is important to differentiate between helicity and chirality. Helicity is the spin angular momentum of a particle projected onto its direction of motion. For a massive particle this quantity is frame dependent. Furthermore, since angular momentum is conserved, as a particle propagates helicity is conserved.
On the other hand, chirality is an innate property of a particle and doesn't change with frame. However, the mass term for a Dirac particle is, \begin{equation} -m(\psi_L^\dagger \psi_R + \psi_R^\dagger\psi_L) \end{equation} (in this notation the Dirac spinor is $\Psi= (\psi_L , \psi_R) ^T $). This term can be thought of as an interaction term in the Lagrangian which switches the chirality of a particle (e.g. a left chiral particle can spontaneously turn into a right chiral particle)
For a massless particle, chirality is equal to helicity.
With that background we can finally address your questions.