Nonlocality of Foldy-Wouthuysen and related transformations for the Dirac equation

2011/08/20 by Tomasz M. Rusin, W. Zawadzki, Wlodek Zawadzki · 5 citations
Physics and Astronomy · #Dirac (video compression format) #Dirac equation #Lambda #Mathematical physics #Negative energy #Physics #Quantum #Quantum Electrodynamics and Casimir Effect #Quantum Mechanics and Applications #Quantum Mechanics and Non-Hermitian Physics #Quantum mechanics #Quantum nonlocality #Space (punctuation) #quant-ph

paper · pdf · doi:10.1103/physreva.84.062124

published in Physical Review A 84(6) (American Physical Society) · 7 pages, two figures

arxiv created 2011/08/20 · openalex publication_date 2011/12/29 · arxiv updated 2011/12/30 · openalex created_date 2016/06/24 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/05

Abstract

Nonlocalities of Foldy-Wouthuysen and related transformations, which are used to separate positive- and negative-energy states in the Dirac equation, are investigated. Second moments of functional kernels generated by the transformations are calculated, and the transformed functions and their variances are computed. It is shown that all the transformed quantities are smeared in the coordinate space by an amount comparable to the Compton wavelength \ensuremathλ_c=\ensuremathℏ/mc.

Citations

• Dirac Equation and Quantum Relativistic Effects in a Single Trapped Ion
• Quantum simulations with cold trapped ions
• Electric Field Effect in Atomically Thin Carbon Films
• The quantum theory of the electron
• On the Dirac Theory of Spin 1/2 Particles and Its Non-Relativistic Limit
• Modern quantum mechanics