The Dirac equation and its solutions (Q455039)

This book gives the recent review of the Dirac equation and its exact solutions which is of fundamental importance for relativistic quantum mechanics and quantum electrodynamics. Moreover, the related topics like the Schroedinger and the Klein-Gordon equations are also included. In this fundamental textbook the authors give all known cases of the external fields and potentials when exact solutions can be found. This book could be of interest to specialists in the fields of quantum mechanics, field theory, and mathematical physics but can also be used as a reading material for lectures and seminars at advanced level. The book is organized in ten chapters and it is broadened by two appendices with aim to help the reader to obtain a deeper understanding of the basic matter (Pauli matrices, vectors and spinors, Dirac-gamma matrices, gamma-matrix structure of the Lorentz transformation, Laguerre functions, Hermite polynomials and Hermite functions). The book contains the detailed bibliography with 345 works cited throughout the text as well as the alphabetical list of subjects treated in the book. The notation is introduced in Chapter 1. Chapter 2 recalls the Maxwell equations for electromagnetic fields and presents the relativistic-mechanical equations in the Lorentz and Hamilton-Jacobi form. Next, the useful reduction schemes of the Dirac equation are given. Finally, special attention is given to the choice of the spin operator. In Chapter 3 exact solution to the Dirac equation for a free particle, for a charge in a magnetic field, in a plane-wave field and in a spherically symmetric field are considered. These were the first problems to be solved exactly in relativistic quantum mechanics and they found wide applications in various physical problems. Chapter 4 presents exact solutions of the Klein-Gordon and Dirac equations with external fields of various configurations. Chapter 5 deals with the extension of the Dirac equation known as the Dirac-Pauli equation and with its exact solutions. In Chapter 6 the propagators of relativistic particles are discussed, i.e. the various Green's functions, constructed in a special way using exact solutions of the Dirac equation. Chapter 7 considers the Dirac equation with quantized plane wave and Chapter 8 deals with the spin equation and its exact solutions. In Chapter 9 the exact solutions of the stationary one-dimensional Schrödinger equation are given. The authors here considered a restricted class of eleven exactly solvable potentials (ESP) that admit solving the considered equation. Finally, the book concludes by Chapter 10 on the coherent states which play an important role in modern quantum theory due to their wide range of applications, e.g. in semiclassical descriptions of quantum systems, quantization theory, condensed matter physics, radiation theory and in quantum computations.