One Massless Particle Equals Two Dirac Singletons: Elementary Particles in a Curved Space. 6.

Mar, 1978
9 pages
Published in:
  • Lett.Math.Phys. 2 (1978) 421-426
Report number:
  • UCLA/78/TEP/4

Citations per year

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Abstract: (Springer)
The ‘remarkable representations of the 3+2 de Sitter group’, discovered by Dirac, later called singleton representations and here denoted Di and Rac, are shown to possess the following truly remarkable property: Each of the direct products Di ⊗ Di, Di ⊗ Rac, and Rac ⊗ Rac decomposes into a direct sum of unitary, irreducible representations, each of which admits an extension to a unitary, irreducible representation of the conformal group SO(4, 2). Therefore, in de Sitter space, every state of a free, ‘massless’ particle may be interpreted as a state of two free singletons — and vice versa. The term ‘massless’ is associated with a set of particle-like representations of SO(3, 2) that, besides the noted conformal extension, exhibit other phenomena typical of masslessness, especially gauge invariance.
  • group: de Sitter
  • group: conformal
  • GROUP THEORY: SO(4,2)
  • GRAVITATION: BACKGROUND
  • PARTICLE: MASSLESS