Related papers: Dirac's Quantum Phase Problem
In 1935, Albert Einstein, Boris Podolsky, and Nathan Rosen ('EPR') reported on a thought experiment that they believed showed that quantum theory provided an incomplete description of reality. Today we know that quantum theory is a complete…
We study vacuum polarization due to strong fields, in the presence of an electron-positron plasma. For this purpose, we expand quantum kinetic equations using weak fields and slow temporal scales as expansion parameters. It is demonstrated…
In 1971 Feynman, Kislinger and Ravndal [1] proposed Lorentz-invariant differential equation capable to describe relativistic particle with mass and internal space-time structure. By making use of new variables that differentiate between…
On 14 December 1900 Max Planck first formulated the idea of energy quanta related to a new universal constant now known as Planck's constant. Despite the following progress of thus initiated "quantum mechanics", the physical origin of both…
The Dirac equation with the Coulomb potential is studied. It is shown that there exists a new invariant in addition to the known Dirac and Johnson-Lippman ones. The solution of the Dirac equation, using the generalized invariant, and…
Classical electromagnetism is linear. However, fields can polarize the vacuum Dirac sea, causing quantum nonlinear electromagnetic phenomena, e.g., scattering and splitting of photons, that occur only in very strong fields found in neutron…
A procedure to calculate the radiation spectrum emitted by an arbitrarily prepared Dirac wave packet is developed. It is based on the Dirac charge current and classical electrodynamic theory. Apart from giving absolute intensity values, it…
A kinetic theory is developed to describe radiating electrons whose motion is governed by the Lorentz-Dirac equation. This gives rise to a generalized Vlasov equation coupled to an equation for the evolution of the physical submanifold of…
Although originally predicted in relativistic quantum mechanics, Zitterbewegung can also appear in some classical systems, which leads to the important question of whether Zitterbewegung of Dirac particles is underlain by a more fundamental…
The author argues that the Dirac quantization condition might imply the existence of an undiscovered electromagnetic structure which governs the quantization of the electric charge and the quantization of the magnetic flux in the…
In this paper we continue our analysis of a formulation of electrodynamics fully covariant under the full Poincar\'e group. Transformations under the four different components of the group force on us the introduction of particles, either…
Although electrons (fermions) and photons(bosons) produce the same interference patterns in the two-slit experiments, the description of these patterns is markedly different. Photons are spin one, relativistic and massless while electrons…
This article compares treatments of the Stern-Gerlach experiment across different physical theories, building up to a novel analysis of electron spin measurement in the context of classical Dirac field theory. Modeling the electron as a…
This paper bridges a historiographical gap in accounts of the prediction and discovery of the positron by combining three ingredients. First, the prediction and discovery of the positron are situated in the broader context of a period of…
Dirac's leaping insight that the normalized anti-commutator of the {\gamma}^{\mu} matrices must equal the timespace signature {\eta}^{\mu}{\nu} was decisive for the success of his equation. The {\gamma}^{\mu}-s are the same in all Lorentz…
I review the paper of Majorana about relativistic particles with arbitrary spin written in 1932. The main motivation for this papers was the dissatisfaction about the negative energy solutions of the Dirac equation. As such, the paper…
In most introductory courses on electrodynamics, one is taught the electric charge is quantised but no theoretical explanation related to this law of nature is offered. Such an explanation is postponed to graduate courses on…
A complete history of early atomic models would fill volumes, but a reasonably coherent tale of the path from mechanical atoms to the quantum can be told by focusing on the relevant work of three great contributors to atomic physics, in the…
An accelerating electric charge coupled to its own electromagnetic (EM) field both emits radiation and experiences the radiation's reaction as a (self-)force. Considering the system from an Effective Field Theory perspective, and using the…
A concept of the total velocity that contains velocity and oscillatory velocity is proposed for the velocity solution of Dirac equation. It is shown that the electronic rest energy all comes from the oscillation of the electron itself. For…