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SALAM 1957

Salam, A.;
On Parity Conservation and Neutrino Mass
Nuovo Cim. 5 (1957) 299;

Reprinted in
The Development of Weak Interaction Theory, editor P. K. Kabir, Gordon and Breach Science Publishers, New York - London, (1963) 63.
Selected papers of Abdus Salam: with commentary, editors A. Ali, C. Isham, T. Kibble, and Riazuddin, (World Scientific series in 20th century physics, 5), World Scientific, Singapore (1994) 167.

Abstracts
Yang and Lee^* have recently suggested that present experimental evidence does not exclude the possibility that parity is not conserved in β-decay. If future experiments confirm this, it may be possible to relate parity-violation in neutrino-decays to the vanishing of neutrino mass and self-mass. The argument is as follows: the free neutrino Lagrangian is invariant for the substitution ψ>_ν → γ₅ψ>_ν (_ν → -_νγ₅). If it is further postulated that neutrino interactions produce no self-mass, one way to secure this is to require that the total Lagrangian also remain invariant for the same substitution (so that _νψ>_ν → -_ν ψ>_ν) while other fields (barring degeneracies which we consider later) remain unchanged. In so far as ψ>_ν and γ₅ψ>_ν have opposite intrinsic parity, most neutrino interactions would then violate parity conservation.

^* C. N. Yang and T. D. Lee. The author is indebted for a pre-print..

Related references
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J. Tiomno, Nuovo Cim. 1 (1955) 226;