Relativistic Quantum Mechanics, an Introduction

73 pages, 1 line figure, 2004 (revised 2008)

Relativistic quantum mechanics are used to describe high-energy particles and highly ionised atoms. They give a consistent formalism for spin-½ particles and provide finer details of atomic and molecular spectra. In short, they are an important tool of modern physics.

This book deals mainly with the Dirac equation, its properties, its applications and its limiting cases. A formalism for particles with arbitrary spin and remarks on other relativistic quantum mechanical equations are given.

This publication is an introduction and is directed towards students of physics and interested physicists. The detailed developments and the numerous references to preceding places make it easier to follow. However, knowledge of the elements of quantum mechanics, relativistic mechanics and electrodynamics is a prerequisite. In order to relieve the reader, we don't deal with rotations of the coordinate system and not with Lorentz groups either. We have no renaming of matrices, no Feynman daggers, no Einstein convention of summation over repeated indices, no quantum field theory, no second quantisation and no natural units with h'=c=1.

From the contents: The Lorentz transformation, quantum mechanical operators, the Dirac equation, probability density, nonrelativistic limits of the Dirac equation, anomalous magnetic moment, free particle, cyclotron motion, parity, total angular momentum, Dirac particle in a Coulomb field, massless particles, particles with arbitrary spin, charge conjugation, the Klein-Gordon equation. The complete list is available via the Table of contents link.

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