The Dirac equation is a cornerstone in the history of physics, merging successfully quantum mechanics with special relativity, providing a natural description of the electron spin and predicting the existence of anti-matter. Furthermore, it is able to reproduce accurately the spectrum of the hydrogen atom and its realm, relativistic quantum mechanics, is considered as the natural transition to quantum field theory. However, the Dirac equation also predicts some peculiar effects such as Klein's paradox and Zitterbewegung, an unexpected quivering motion of a free relativistic quantum particle first examined by Schrödinger. These and other predictions would be difficult to observe in real particles, while constituting key fundamental examples to understand relativistic quantum effects. Recent years have seen an increased interest in simulations of relativistic quantum effects in different physical setups, where parameter tunability allows accessibility to different physical regimes. Here, we perform a proof-of-principle quantum simulation of the one-dimensional Dirac equation using a single trapped ion, which is set to behave as a free relativistic quantum particle. We measure as a function of time the particle position and study Zitterbewegung for different initial superpositions of positive and negative energy spinor states, as well as the cross-over from relativistic to nonrelativistic dynamics. The high level of control of trapped-ion experimental parameters makes it possible to simulate elegant textbook examples of relativistic quantum physics.
By the large and small wave-function components approach we achieved the nonrela-tivistic limit of the Dirac equation in interaction with an electromagnetic potential in noncommutative phase-space, and we tested the effect of the phase-space noncommutativity on it, knowing that the nonrelativistic limit of the Dirac equation gives the Schrödinger-Pauli equation.
We consider the representations of the optical Dirac equation, especially ones where the Hamiltonian is purely real-valued. This is equivalent, for Maxwell's equations, to the Majorana representation of the massless Dirac (Weyl) equation. We draw analogies between the Dirac, chiral and Majorana representations of the Dirac and optical Dirac equations, and derive two new optical Majorana representations. Just as the Dirac and chiral representations are related to optical spin and helicity states, these Majorana representations of the optical Dirac equation are associated with the linear polaris…
The generalized Dirac oscillator as one of the exact solvable model in quantum mechanics was introduced in 2+1-dimensional world in this paper. What is more, the general expressions of the exact solutions for these models with the inverse cubic, quartic, quintic and sixtic power potentials in radial Dirac equation were further given by means of the Bethe ansatz method. And finally, the corresponding exact solutions in this paper were further discussed.
Generalized Dirac equation containing vacuum-mass contribution is introduced. The vacuum-mass contribution arises due to the coupling of quantum mechanical matter field with the vacuum field. Vacuum stress energy tensor arises in the Scalar-Tensor Field equation (Extended Einstein's Field equation), implies a mass like corrections to the newly formulated Dirac equation. Apart from the inertial mass of the electron, generalized Dirac equation proposed here, contains a mass-term as a result of vacuum field coupling.
Previously (A. Akhmeteli, J. Math. Phys., v. 52, p. 082303 (2011)), the Dirac equation in an arbitrary electromagnetic field was shown to be generally equivalent to a fourth-order equation for just one component of the four-component Dirac spinor function. This was done for a specific (chiral) representation of gamma-matrices and for a specific component. In the current work, the result is generalized for a general representation of gamma-matrices and a general component (satisfying some conditions). The resulting equivalent of the Dirac equation is also manifestly relativistically covariant a…
We derive the Schrödinger-Newton equation as the non-relativistic limit of the Einstein-Dirac equations. Our analysis relaxes the assumption of spherical symmetry, made in earlier work in the literature, while deriving this limit. Since the spin of the Dirac field couples naturally to torsion, we generalize our analysis to the Einstein Cartan-Dirac (ECD) equations, again recovering the Schrödinger-Newton equation.
We propose nonlinear Dirac equations where the conformal degree of the self-interaction terms are equal to that of the Dirac operator and the coupling parameters are dimensionless. As such, the massless equation is conformally invariant and preserves the conformal degree for both the linear and nonlinear components. In 2+1 space-time, we use these features to propose three- and four-parameter nonlinear Dirac equation models that might be useful for applications in 2D systems such as graphene sheets, ribbons and nanotubes.
