A Physically Meaningful Relativistic Description of the Spin State of an Electron

Abstract

We introduced a new model to present the states of a two-state quantum system. The space is the complexified Minkowski space. The Lorentz group acts by the linear extension of its action on the four-vectors. We applied this model to represent the spin state of an electron or any relativistic spin 1/2 particle. The spin state of such particle is of the form U+iS, where U is the four-velocity of the particle in the lab frame, and S is the 4D spin in this frame. Under this description, the transition probability between two pure spin states ϱ1 and ϱ2 of particles moving with the same velocity are defined by use of Minkowski dot product as 12<ϱ2|ϱ1>. This transition probability is Lorentz invariant, coincide with the quantum mechanics prediction and thus agree with the experimental results testing quantum mechanics predictions based on Bell’s inequality. For a a particle of mass m and charge q with the spin state ϱ, the total momentum is mcϱ and the electromagnetic momentum is qϱ. This imply that the Landé g factor for such particles must be g=2. We obtain an evolution equation of the spin state in an electromagnetic field which defines correctly the anomalous Zeeman effect and the fine structure splitting.