Discrete Symmetries in the Chiral Fermion Formalism

Abstract

In this paper, we present a revision of the discrete symmetries (C, P, T, CP, and CPT) within an approach that treats 2-component Weyl spinors as the fundamental building blocks. In particular, we show that we can define transformations for CP, T, and CPT without exchanging the right-handed and left-handed representative components that form a Dirac spinor, as is done in the traditional Dirac formalism. Then, we discuss some salient aspects of the discrete symmetries within quantum field theory (QFT). Besides the generic discussion, we also consider aspects arising within specific renormalizable theories, such as Quantum Electrodynamics (QED) and Yang-Mills (YM) theory. With the above, in addition to presenting a good introduction for non-experts, we establish how to use the chiral fermion formalism to study discrete symmetries in the context of QFT.