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C. J. L. Doran, A. N. Lasenby and S. F. Gull.
States and Operators in the Spacetime Algebra
Found. Phys. 23(9), 1239-1264 (1993)
Abstract: The spacetime algebra (STA) is the natural, representation-free
language for Dirac's theory of the electron. Conventional Pauli,
Dirac, Weyl and Majorana spinors are replaced by spacetime multivectors,
and the quantum sigma- and gamma-matrices are replaced by two-sided
multivector operations. The STA is defined over the reals, and the
role of the scalar unit imaginary of quantum mechanics is played
by a fixed spacetime bivector. The extension to multiparticle systems
involves a separate copy of the STA for each particle, and it is
shown that the standard unit imaginary induces correlations between
these particle spaces. In the STA, spinors and operators can be
manipulated without introducing any matrix representation or coordinate
system. Furthermore, the formalism provides simple expressions for
the spinor bilinear covariants which dispense with the need for
the Fierz identities. A reduction to 2+1 dimensions is given, and
applications beyond the Dirac theory are discussed.
pdf, postscript
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