Why can’t neutral pion decay to two neutrino’s

particle-physicspionsweak-interaction

I know neutral pions mostly decay electromagnetically to two photons, but I don't understand why the decay to two neutrino's is not possible.

Perhaps they violate parity, but someone at the link https://www.physicsforums.com/threads/is-neutrino-spin-parity-1-2-or-1-2.934771/ said it does not make sense to talk about parity for neutrino's since they are produced only via the weak interaction, which does not conserve parity.

Best Answer

Pion decay to two photons is electromagnetic (the original flavor chiral anomaly). But decay to two neutrinos could only go through a box diagram involving two Ws of opposite charge: the quarks or antiquarks hairpin of the pion wavefunction has to decay to a virtual $W^+ ~ W^-$ pair, which then connect to a similar hairpin involving a virtual charged lepton and a $\nu ~\bar \nu$ pair of decay product particles.

  • That, then, entails a doubly weak suppression, by, at the very least, a factor of $(m_\pi/M_W)^8$ ... twenty two orders of magnitude. Hopeless.

As for parity, indeed, the doubly weak interaction blasts parity to vapor, but further consider that a neutrino-anti neutrino pair has the parity of a quark-antiquark pair…

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