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Journal of Physics Conference Series

The missing piece: a new relativistic wave equation, the Pearcey equation

Ambra Lattanzi, Decio Levi B, Amalia Torre

Published Apr 1, 2019• 2 citations
Publisher

Abstract

The relativistic wave equations currently used in physics are the Dirac equation and the Klein-Gordon equation. Only recently, the Salpeter equation has stimulated the interest of the scientific community. In this paper a new relativistic wave equation for particles with non-zero rest mass, the Pearcey equation, is presented. There is great formal similarity between the Pearcey equation, the Schrödinger equation and the Salpeter equation. In particular, the Pearcey equation allows us to understand the onset of the relativistic behaviour in a similar way as the Salpeter equation. It is possibile also to keep the parallelism between optics and quantum mechanics at which we are used in non relativistic quantum mechanics.

DOI
10.1088/1742-6596/1194/1/012065

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The relativistic wave equations currently used in physics are the Dirac equation and the Klein-Gordon equation. Only recently, the Salpeter equation has stimulated the interest of the scientific community. In this paper a new relativistic wave equation for particles with non-zero rest mass, the Pearcey equation, is presented. There is great formal similarity between the Pearcey equation, the Schrödinger equation and the Salpeter equation. In particular, the Pearcey equation allows us to understand the onset of the relativistic behaviour in a similar way as the Salpeter equation. It is possibile also to keep the parallelism between optics and quantum mechanics at which we are used in non relativistic quantum mechanics.
A new relativistic quantum wave equation has been derived by applying the quantum prescription to the momentum and the kinetic energy rather than to the momentum and the total energy, since after all it is the kinetic energy that generates the momentum. The resulting equation reduces to the Schrodinger equation in the nonrelativistic limit and to the Klein-Gordon equation for “massless particles” in the relativistic limit, i.e., if the velocity of the particle approaches that of light, c. For massive particles in general, the new equation deviates from the Klein-Gordon equation. The same equation is shown to decouple according to the Dirac formalism, yielding a modified form of Dirac equation. When applied to a rest particle, the modified Dirac equation is shown to avoid a negative energy solution and instead include a constant solution. The other, the time-dependent particle solution of the modified Dirac equation, has the characteristic frequency Mc2/(ћ/2) , i.e., twice those of the Dirac solutions, Mc2/ћ.
The Klein-Gordon equation describes the wave-like behavior of spinless particles since it is Lorentz invariant. While it seemed initially ripe for explaining the electronic structure of the hydrogen atom, the lack of a unconditional positive probability density really limited its applications. Yet, it is intimately connected with fermions. Any solution to the Dirac equation is automatically a solution to the Klein-Gordon equation. What is even more surprising, the Klein-Gordon equation for a free particle turns into the Schrödinger equation in the non-relativistic limit. In this work we show that these problems disappear when we use the relativistic mass instead of the rest mass. While the Klein-Gordon equation losses its Lorentz invariance because of this transformation, it gains most of the features present the Schrödinger equation, including the unconditional positivity of probability density, while keeping most of its relativistic characteristics intact, including the matter-wave dispersion relation. What is even more surprising, the non-relativistic, quasi-static limit of the Klein-Gordon equation with relativistic mass is simply the Schrödinger equation under all possible conditions. So, it can be argued that this Klein-Gordon equation is a sort of relativistic Schrödinger equation.
Abstract The Klein–Gordon and the Dirac equations are studied as candidates for a relativistic generalisation of the Schrödinger equation. We show that the first is unacceptable because it admits solutions with arbitrarily large negative energy and has no conserved current with positive definite probability density. The Dirac equation on the other hand does have a physically acceptable conserved current, but it too suffers from the presence of negative energy solutions. We show that the latter can be interpreted as describing anti-particles. In either case there is no fully consistent interpretation as a single-particle wave equation and we are led to a formalism admitting an infinite number of degrees of freedom, that is a quantum field theory. We can still use the Dirac equation at low energies when the effects of anti-particles are negligible and we study applications in atomic physics.