Now take the sum and the difference of the two equations.
Now rewriting in terms of
With this definition, the relativistic equation can be simplified a great deal.
The Dirac equation in the absence of EM fields is
is a 4-component Dirac spinor and, like the spin states we are used
to, represents a coordinate different from the spatial ones.The gamma
matrices are 4 by 4 matrices operating in this spinor space. Note that
there are 4 matrices, one for each coordinate but that the row or column
of the matrix does not correlate with the coordinate.
Like the Pauli matrices, the gamma matrices form a vector, (this time a
4vector).
satisfy ,
There are a few other representations of the Dirac matrices that are
used. We will try hard to stick with this one, the one originally proposed
by Dirac.
It is interesting to note that the primary physics input was the choice
of the Schrödinger-Pauli Hamiltonian
that gave us the correct interaction with the electron's spin. We have
applied this same momentum operator relativistically, not much of a
stretch. We have also written the equation in terms of four components,
but there was no new physics in that since everything could be computed
Dirac's paper did not follow the same line of reasoning. Historically, the
Schrödinger-Pauli Hamiltonian was derived from the Dirac equation. It
was Dirac who produced the correct equation for electrons and went on
to interpret it to gain new insight into physics.
Dirac Biography
Because we have eliminated the matrices from the equation, this is an equation for each
component of the Dirac spinor . Each component satisfies the wave (Klein-Gordon)
equation and a solution can be written as a constant spinor times the usual exponential
representing a wave.
for .
Now we apply the Dirac equation and try to use our operators
to help solve the problem.
The Dirac Equation then is.
.
(Note that our previous functions made use of
particularly in the calculation of
and .)
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and .
gives .
At this point we take the difference between the two equations to
get one condition.
Using the quantum numbers from four mutually commuting
operators, we have solved the radial equation in a similar way as
for the non-relativistic case yielding the exact energy relation for
relativistic Quantum Mechanics.