Particle physicists have only observed or inferred left-chiral fermions and right-chiral antifermions engaging in the charged weak interaction. In the case of the weak interaction, which can in principle engage with both left- and right-chiral fermions, only two left-handed fermions interact. Interactions involving right-handed or opposite-handed fermions have not been shown to occur, implying that the universe has a preference for left-handed chirality. This preferential treatment of one chiral realization over another violates parity, as first noted by Chien Shiung Wu in her famous experiment known as the Wu experiment. This is a striking observation, since parity is a symmetry that holds for all other fundamental interactions.
Chirality for a Dirac fermion  is defined through the operator , which has eigenvalues ±1; the eigenvalues sign is equal to the particles chirality: +1 for right-handed, −1 for left-handed. Any Dirac field can thus be projected into its left- or right-handed component by acting with the projection operators  or  on .
The coupling of the charged weak interaction to fermions is proportional to the first projection operator, which is responsible for this interaction's parity symmetry violation.
A common source of confusion is due to conflating the , chirality operator with the helicity operator. Since the helicity of massive particles is frame-dependent, it might seem that the same particle would interact with the weak force according to one frame of reference, but not another. The resolution to this paradox is that , for which helicity is not frame-dependent. By contrast, for massive particles, chirality is not the same as helicity, or, alternatively,  helicity is not Lorentz invariant, so there is no frame dependence of the weak interaction: a particle that couples to the weak force in one frame does so in every frame.
A theory that is asymmetric with respect to chiralities is called a chiral theory, while a non-chiral (i.e., parity-symmetric) theory is sometimes called a vector theory. Many pieces of the Standard Model of physics are non-chiral, which is traceable to  anomaly cancellation in chiral theories. Quantum chromodynamics is an example of a vector theory, since both chiralities of all quarks appear in the theory, and couple to gluons in the same way.
The electroweak theory, developed in the mid 20th century, is an example of a chiral theory. Originally, it assumed that neutrinos were massless, and assumed the existence of only left-handed neutrinos and right-handed antineutrinos. After the observation of neutrino oscillations, which imply that neutrinos are massive (like all other fermions) the revised theories of the electroweak interaction now include both right- and left-handed neutrinos. However, it is still a chiral theory, as it does not respect parity symmetry.
The exact nature of the neutrino is still unsettled and so the electroweak theories that have been proposed are somewhat different, but most accommodate the chirality of neutrinos in the same way as was already done for all other fermions.