95 views

### What is negative energy as used by Dirac to explain pair production? [duplicate]

While reading about pair production, I came across the concept of negative energy. What is negative energy exactly? And can there be negative mass corresponding to this energy?
59 views

### Does the positron prove that Dirac's electron sea must exist? [duplicate]

Does the fact that the positron exists in cosmic rays prove the existence of Dirac' s 'sea' of spin-paired electrons in space.
3k views

### Is Zitterbewegung an artefact of single-particle theory?

I have seen a number of articles on Zitterbewegung claiming searches for it such as this one: http://arxiv.org/abs/0810.2186. Others such as the so-called ZBW interpretation by Hestenes seemingly ...
7k views

### What is negative about negative energy states in the Dirac equation?

This question is a follow up to What was missing in Dirac's argument to come up with the modern interpretation of the positron? There still is some confusion in my mind about the so-called "...
626 views

### Why aren't purely Dirac neutrinos ruled out?

It is common knowledge that in neutrinos can be Dirac particles without any Majorana masses as given a mass matrix, \left( \begin{array}{cc}\nu _L & \nu _R \end{array} \right) \...
250 views

### What is the exact relation between anti-matter and relativity?

I have seen in relativistic QM that, when trying to create the Dirac Equation, it only make sense to be acting on -- at minimum -- a 4-component vector (actually a bi-spinor). I guess this is because ...
289 views

### Why is the Dirac Sea concept taught in physics courses without explaining that is fundamentally flawed? [closed]

Many physics text books reference to the concept of the Dirac sea as explanation of negative frequency solutions of the Dirac equation. It is supposed to be a bottomless "sea" of filled electron ...
333 views

### What's the role of the Dirac vacuum sea in quantum field theory?

It's often claimed that the Dirac sea is obsolete in quantum field theory. On the other hand, for example, Roman Jackiw argues in this paper that Once again we must assign physical reality to Dirac’...
309 views

### Is zitterbewegung physical or not?

It appears that zitterbewegung, a frequency associated with the total energy of a particle or system, is widely considered to be an unphysical quantity (e.g., Kobakhidze et.al.), @Lubos Motl, McMillan)...
286 views

### How does the Dirac equation show the existence of anti-particles?

I want to understand the following "The Dirac equation for a charged massive fermion predicts, correctly, the existence of an antiparticle of the same mass and spin, but opposite charge, and ...
261 views

### How does the negative energy solution to the Dirac equation predict the antielectron?

Please, can someone explain how the negative energy solution can be used to predict the existence of the antielectron?
When we calculate the total charge and energy of a quantum field by using Noether's theorem, we find that they are infinitely large, even if we consider a finite spacetime volume_ H = \int_V \...