Bispinor

In physics, and specifically in quantum field theory, a bispinor is a mathematical construction that is used to describe some of the fundamental particles of nature, including quarks and electrons. It is a specific embodiment of a spinor, specifically constructed so that it is consistent with the requirements of special relativity. Bispinors transform in a certain "spinorial" fashion under the action of the Lorentz group, which describes the symmetries of Minkowski spacetime. They occur in the relativistic spin-1/2 wave function solutions to the Dirac equation. Bispinors are so called because they are constructed out of two simpler component spinors, the Weyl spinors. Each of the two component spinors transform differently under the two distinct complex-conjugate spin-1/2 representations of the Lorentz group. This pairing is of fundamental importance, as it allows the represented particle to have a mass, carry a charge, and represent the flow of charge as a current, and perhaps most importantly, to carry angular momentum. More precisely, the mass is a Casimir invariant of the Lorentz group (an eigenstate of the energy), while the vector combination carries momentum and current, being covariant under the action of the Lorentz group. The angular momentum is carried by the Poynting vector, suitably constructed for the spin field. A bispinor is more or less "the same thing" as a Dirac spinor. The convention used here is that the article on the Dirac spinor presents plane-wave solutions to the Dirac equation using the Dirac convention for the gamma matrices. That is, the Dirac spinor is a bispinor in the Dirac convention. By contrast, the article below concentrates primarily on the Weyl, or chiral representation, is less focused on the Dirac equation, and more focused on the geometric structure, including the geometry of the Lorentz group. Thus, much of what is said below can be applied to the Majorana equation. Bispinors are elements of a 4-dimensional complex vector space (1/2, 0) ⊕ (0, 1/2) representation of the Lorentz group.