Dirac Wave Functions of Positive Energy with Arbitrarily Small Position Uncertainty
Quantum Physics
2026-03-10 v2
Abstract
We consider wave functions in the Hilbert space of a single Dirac particle, specifically from the positive-energy subspace of the free Dirac Hamiltonian. Over the decades, various authors conjectured that for wave functions from , there is a positive lower bound to the position uncertainty ; in other words, that such states cannot be arbitrarily narrow in . Building on work by Bracken and Melloy, we show that this conjecture is false. (In fact, they already stated that this conjecture is false and already had a counter-example, but their proof that it is a counter-example had a gap.)
Cite
@article{arxiv.2603.04569,
title = {Dirac Wave Functions of Positive Energy with Arbitrarily Small Position Uncertainty},
author = {Ilmar Bürck and Roderich Tumulka},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2603.04569},
year = {2026}
}
Comments
18 pages LaTeX, 3 figure files; v2 minor addition