Solution of Dirac Equation for a Free Particle

Mathematical elegance of the Dirac Equation

Extending the Schrödinger-Pauli Hamiltonian concept to use the relativistic

energy equation.

The idea is to replace with . For simplicity, we first do it with no EM

field.
This is again written in terms of a 2 component spinor .
This equation is clearly headed toward being second order in the time
derivative. As with Maxwell's equation, which is first order when written in
terms of the field tensor, we can try to write a first order equation in terms
of a quantity derived from . Define

Including the two components of and the two components

of , we now have four components which satisfy the equations.

These (last) two equations couple the 4 components together
unless . Both of the above equations are first order in the time
derivative. We could continue with this set of coupled equations but it is
more reasonable to write a single equation in terms of a 4 component
wave function. This will also be a first order equation. First rewrite the
two equations together, putting all the terms on one side.

Now take the sum and the difference of the two equations.
Now rewriting in terms of

and and ordering it as a matrix equation, we

get.

Remember that and are two component spinors so this is

an equation in 4 components.We can rewrite the matrix above as a dot
product between 4-vectors. The matrix has a dot product in 3 dimensions
and a time component
The 4 by 4 matrices are given by.

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.

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Like the Pauli matrices, the gamma matrices form a vector, (this time a
4vector).

It is easy to see by inspection that the matrices

are Hermitian and traceless. A little computation will verify
that they anticommute as the Pauli matrices did.
Sakurai shows that the anticommutation is all that is needed to determine
the physics. That is, for any set of 4 by 4 matrices that

satisfy ,

will give the same physical result, although the representation of

may be different. This is truly an amazing result.

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

from two components, say since

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

Solution of Dirac Equation for a Free Particle

As with the Schrödinger equation, the simplest solutions of the Dirac
equation are those for a free particle. They are also quite important to
understand. We will find that each component of the Dirac spinor
represents a state of a free particle at rest that we can interpret fairly
easily.We can show that a free particle solution can be written as
a constant spinor times the usual free particle exponential. Start
from the Dirac equation and attempt to develop an equation to show that
each component has the free particle exponential. We will do this by
making a second order differential equation, which turns out to be the
Klein-Gordon equation.
The free electron solutions all satisfy the wave equation.

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.

Plugging this into the equation, we get a relation between the

momentum and the energy.
Note that the momentum operator is clearly still and the

energy operator is still .There is no coupling between the

different components in this equation, but, we will see that
(unlike the equation differentiated again) the Dirac equation will
give us relations between the components of the constant
spinor. Again, the solution can be written as a constant spinor,
which may depend on momentum , times the exponential.

We should normalize the state if we want to describe one particle

per unit volume: . We haven't learned much about

what each component represents yet. We also have the plus or

minus in the relation to deal with. The

solutions for a free particle at rest will tell us more about what the
different components mean.

Solution of the Dirac Equation for Hydrogen

The standard Hydrogen atom problem can be solved exactly
using relativistic quantum mechanics. The full solution is a bit
long but short compared to the complete effort we made in non-
relativistic QM. We have already seen that (even with no applied
fields), while the total angular momentum operator commutes
with the Dirac Hamiltonian, neither the orbital angular
momentum operator nor the spin operators do commute with .
The addition of a spherically symmetric potential does not
change these facts.We have shown in the section on conserved
quantities that the operator

also commutes with the Hamiltonian and with . is a

measure of the component of spin along the total angular
momentum direction. We will use to help solve problems
with spherical symmetry and ultimately the problem of hydrogen.
We therefore have four mutually commuting operators the
eigenvalues of which can completely label the eigenstates:
The operator may be written in several ways.

Assume that the eigenvalues of are given by

We now compare the and operators

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The eigenvalues of are
We may explicitly write out the eigenvalue equation for

for .

The difference between and is related to .

We may solve for the effect of on the spinor , then,

solve for the effect of . Note that since and are

eigenstates of and , they are eigenstates of but
have different eigenvalues.
Note that the eigenvalues for the upper and lower components
have the same possible
values, but are opposite for energy eigenstates. We already

know the relation from NR QM. We simply check

that it is the same here.
It is correct. So and are eigenstates of but with
different eigenvalues.

Now we apply the Dirac equation and try to use our operators
to help solve the problem.
The Dirac Equation then is.

We can use commutation and anticommutation relations

to write in terms of separate angular and radial
operators.

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Note that the operators and act only on the angular
momentum parts of the state. There are no radial derivatives so

they commute with . Lets pick a

shorthand notation for the angular momentum eigenstates we

must use. These have quantum numbers , , and .
will have and must have the other possible value
of which we label . Following the notation of Sakurai, we
will call the
state

.
(Note that our previous functions made use of
particularly in the calculation of

and .)
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The effect of the two operators related to angular

momentum can be deduced. First, is related to . For

positive , has . For negative , has

. For either, has the opposite relation for ,

indicating why the full spinor is not an eigenstate of .

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Second, is a pseudoscalar operator. It therefore changes

parity and the parity of the state is given by ; so it must

change .
The square of the operator is one, as is clear from the
derivation above, so we know the effect of this operator up to a
phase factor.

The phase factor depends on the conventions we choose for the

states . For our conventions, the factor is .

We now have everything we need to get to the radial

equations.
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This is now a set of two coupled radial equations. We can

simplify them a bit by making the substitutions

and . The extra term from the derivative cancels the

1's that are with s.
These equations are true for any spherically symmetric potential.
Now it is time to specialize to the hydrogen atom for

which . We define and

and the dimensionless . The

equations then become.

With the guidance of the non-relativistic solutions, we

will postulate a solution of the form
The exponential will make everything go to zero for large if
the power series terminates. We need to verify that this is a

solution near if we pick the right , , and . We

now substitute these postulated solutions into the equations
to obtain recursion relations.

For the lowest order term , we need to have a solution

without lower powers. This means that we look at
the recursion relations with and
solve the equations.

Note that while is a non-zero integer, is a small non-

integer number. We need to take the positive root in order to
keep the state normalized.

As usual, the series must terminate at some for the

state to normalizable. This can be seen approximately by
assuming either the 's or the 's are small and noting that the
series is that of a positive exponential.

Assume the series for and terminate at the same .

We can then take the equations in the coefficients and

set to get relationships between

and .

These are the same equation, which is consistent with our

assumption.The final step is to use this result in the recursion

relations for to find a condition on which

must be satisfied for the series to terminate. Note that this choice

of connects and to the rest of the series giving

nontrivial conditions on . We already have the information
from the next step in the recursion which

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.

We can identify the standard principle quantum number in this

case as . This result gives the same answer

as our non-relativistic calculation to order but is also correct
to higher order. It is an exact solution to the quantum
mechanics problem posed but does not include the effects
of field theory, such as the Lamb shift and the anomalous
magnetic moment of the electron.
Relativistic corrections become quite important for high
atoms in which the typical velocity of electrons in the most inner
shells is of order