40 Chapter 3 The Dirac Field matrices that act on ordinary Lorentz 4-vectors. To see this, parametrize an infinitesimal transformation as follows: Ve = (5% — Sem TM \a)V, (3.19) where V is a 4-vector and w,,, an antisymmetric tensor, gives the infinites- imal angles. For example, consider the case wj2 = —w21 = 4, with all other components of w equal to zero. Then Eq. (3.19) becomes 100 0 01-60 Voloa1 ol’ (3.20) 0001 which is just an infinitesimal rotation in the xy-plane. You can also verify that setting wo: = —wip = 8 gives vo v, (3.21) cory 0 0 1 0 come an infinitesimal boost in the x-direction. The other components of w generate the remaining boosts and rotations in a similar manner. 3.2 The Dirac Equation Now that we have seen one finite-dimensional representation of the Lorentz group, the logical next step would be to develop the formalism for finding all other representations. Although this is not very difficult to do (see Prob- lem 3.1), it is hardly necessary for our purposes, since we are mainly interested in the representation(s) corresponding to spin 1/2. We can find such a representation using a trick due to Dirac: Suppose that we had a set of four n x n matrices 7 satisfying the anticommutation relations Lt} ty? 47%!" = 29!” x Inn (Dirac algebra). (3.22) Then we could immediately write down an n-dimensional representation of the Lorentz algebra. Here it is: gH = hy). (3.23) By repeated use of (3.22), it is easy to verify that these matrices satisfy the commutation relations (3.17). This computation goes through in any dimensionality, with Lorentz or Euclidean metric. In particular, it should work in three-dimensional Euclidean