Canonical formalism and quantization of a massless spinning bosonic particle in four dimensions

Abstract

A twistor model of a free massless spinning particle in four-dimensional Minkowski space is studied in terms of space–time and spinor variables. This model is specified by a simple action, referred to here as the gauged Shirafuji action, that consists of twistor variables and gauge fields on the one-dimensional parameter space. We consider the canonical formalism of the model by following the Dirac formulation for constrained Hamiltonian systems. In the subsequent quantization procedure, we obtain a plane-wave solution with momentum spinors. From this solution and coefficient functions, we construct positive-frequency and negative-frequency spinor wave functions defined on complexified Minkowski space. It is shown that the Fourier–Laplace transforms of the coefficient functions lead to the spinor wave functions expressed as the Penrose transforms of the corresponding holomorphic functions on twistor space. We also consider the exponential generating function for the spinor wave functions and derive a novel representation for each of the spinor wave functions.