Reflections, spinors, and projections on a Minkowski space underlie Dirac's equation (Q1913658)
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English | Reflections, spinors, and projections on a Minkowski space underlie Dirac's equation |
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Reflections, spinors, and projections on a Minkowski space underlie Dirac's equation (English)
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10 March 1997
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This article is simply a review with reasonable mathematical rigour of well-known results in the theory of reflections, projections and spinors, presented with various degrees of rigour in many physical and mathematical textbooks. We quote that the author's results can be obtained more easily without the introduction of matrix representations using a Clifford approach, as e.g. demonstrated by the reviewer, \textit{Q. A. G. de Souza, J. Vaz jun.} and \textit{P. Lounesto} [Int. J. Theor. Phys. 35, No. 9, 1849-1900 (1996)]. It is necessary to emphasize that the authors confound Minkowski spacetime (which is an affine space) with the Minkowski vector space that they use. Finally, the definition of inertial reference frame (irf) they give is odd. Indeed, the correct definition is that an irf is a timelike vector field \(I \in \text{sec TM}\) pointing to the future such that \(g(I,I) = 1\), \(g : \text{TM} \times \text{TM} \to \mathbb{R}\) being the metric tensor of \(M\).
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Minkowski space
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Dirac equation
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reflections
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projections
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spinors
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