Parity [The Physics Travel Guide]

--- advanced_notions:parity [2018/03/30 10:03]
jakobadmin [Intuitive]
+++ advanced_notions:parity [2018/03/30 13:19] (current)
jakobadmin [Intuitive]
@@ Line 3: / Line 3: @@
 <tabbox Intuitive>
+<blockquote>If you take a mirror, and look at a left hand in the mirror, it looks light a right hand. Such a process, which turns something behaving like a left hand into something like a right hand, is called a parity transformation in particle physics.
+<cite>http://axelmaas.blogspot.de/2011/11/chiral-or-why-left-and-right-is-not.html</cite></blockquote>
-Acting with a parity transformation on a system simply means that we create a mirrored copy of it.
+Acting with a parity transformation on a system simply means that we create a mirrored copy of it. Another name for a parity transformation is spatial inversions.
+So parity symmetry means mirror symmetry.
 <tabbox Concrete>
-<note tip>
+Explicitly, the parity operator acting on four-vectors is given by
-In this section things should be explained by analogy and with pictures and, if necessary, some formulas.
-</note>
+\begin{equation} \label{eq:pardef3d} \Lambda_P = \begin{pmatrix}
+& 0 & 0 & 0 \\ 0&-1 & 0 & 0\\ 0 & 0 & -1 & 0 \\ 0 & 0 & 0 & -1
+\end{pmatrix}   \end{equation}
+This matrix flips all spatial coordinates and keeps the time coordinate unchanged.
 <tabbox Abstract>