Implications of the helicity conservation for on-shell and off-shell chirality production

Abstract

We analyze the helicity conservation following from the axial Ward identity for the massless fermion. We discuss the pair production of a fermion, $\ell$, and an anti-fermion, $\bar{\ell}$, from the annihilation process of photons, $\gamma$'s and conclude that the chirality production is prohibited in any annihilation process of on-shell $\gamma$'s. We demonstrate this selection rule in the tree-level process of $\gamma+\gamma\to \ell+\bar{\ell}$. We next consider the off-shell effect on the chirality production in the presence of the background magnetic field. We point out that the particle conversion process under the magnetic field induces the polarization of an incident $\gamma$, which can also be interpreted intuitively from the helicity conservation.