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Are Neutrinos Completely Neutral Particles?

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Book cover Scientific Papers of Ettore Majorana

Abstract

In A symmetric theory of electrons and positrons [1] of 1937 Majorana published his theoretical discovery of the completely neutral spinors. Among the known elementary particles, neutrinos may be such, namely equal to their antiparticles. Other cases are hypothetically foreseen by Supersymmetry, such as the neutralino and the gluino. The Majorana solution of the Dirac equation, his representation of the Dirac γ matrices and the properties of his spinor are described in the first chapter of this book by A. Zichichi, to which I refer the reader (AZ in the following).

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Unfortunately, in the literature the words “left” and “right” are used both to mean negative and positive chirality respectively (both neutrinos and antineutrinos are left in this sense), and also negative and positive helicity (relativistic neutrinos would be called (almost) left, antineutrinos (almost) right). The confusion arose because for massless particles chirality eigenstates are also helicity eigenstates and the standard model assumes neutrinos to be massless.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. University and INFN, Padua, Italy

    Alessandro Bettini

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  1. Alessandro Bettini
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Correspondence to Alessandro Bettini .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Physics, University of Bologna, Bologna, Italy

    Luisa Cifarelli

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Bettini, A. (2020). Are Neutrinos Completely Neutral Particles?. In: Cifarelli, L. (eds) Scientific Papers of Ettore Majorana. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-23509-3_13

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