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Original Articles

All you need to know about the Dirac equation

Pages 2585-2601 | Received 22 Apr 2008, Accepted 30 May 2008, Published online: 04 Dec 2010
 

Abstract

A very brief introduction is given to all that is needed to appreciate the formal structure of the Dirac equation and why–without destroying this structure–it cannot be reduced to a Pauli-Schrödinger type equation.

Acknowledgements

I would very much like to acknowledge the influence of my former teachers Per-Olov Löwdin (Uppsala, together with Harold MacIntosh), Simon Altmann (Oxford) and Walter Kohn (Santa Barbara). While Per-Olov raised my interest in ‘formal structures’, it was Simon who completely indoctrinated me with group theory as a formal tool to view ‘structures’. And Walter taught me to keep the right distance to my own research.

Notes

Notes

1. for a discussion of classical relativistic dynamics see, e.g. the book by Messiah Citation6.

2. This is exactly the algebra of creation and annihilation operators for fermions.

3. Because of the block-diagonal form of the Dirac matrix β.

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