A fermion primer

Abstract

This is a review paper intended to illustrate a few critical issues concerning Dirac, Weyl and Majorana fermions and their differences. The first part consists in basic introductions to fermions, and more in detail to fermions in 4d, focusing in particular in what differentiate the three type of fermions: chirality, helicity, mass, field equations, properties under discrete symmetry transformations, Actions, Observables. On this basis we tackle a series of challenging and sometime controversial problems: the non-existence of Weyl fermion propagators, and the ways to circumvent it; the regularizations for Weyl fermion amplitudes, in particular the appropriateness of using the PV regularization; the definition of a functional integral for Weyl fermion, the difference between Weyl and massless Majorana fermions and the difference between the Dirac and Majorana mass terms. Most notably we come to the conclusion that the trick of replacing the non-existing Weyl fermion propagator with a massless Dirac one, although it may yield in some cases correct results, is flawed at the very origin by a logical loophole. We then show which is the correct way to proceed in this case. We consider also the topic of applying the Wick rotation at the classical Action level for Weyl fermions and conclude that this procedure leads to a nonequivalent theory. Finally, although anomalies are not the central focus here, we have deemed it useful to summarily review the relation, and its cohomological basis, that exists between the lack of a Weyl fermion propagator (non-invertibility of the Weyl-Dirac operator) and the appearance of dangerous anomalies in the theory.