3.2, The Dirac Equation 43 To see that the Dirac equation implies the Klein-Gordon equation, act on the left with (-i7"9, —_m): 0 = (~in*O, — m)(i7"O, — mp = ("9 Oy + m? Jes = (bfyH, 0,0, + mw = (8 + m?)y. To write down a Lagrangian for the Dirac theory, we must figure out how to multiply two Dirac spinors to form a Lorentz scalar. The obvious guess, wy, does not work. Under a Lorentz boost this becomes wt‘, Ay qd; if the boost matrix were unitary, we would have Al = Aj and everything would be fine. But A. is not unitary, because the generators (3.26) are not Hermitian. The solution is to define _ =yty. (3.32) Under an infinitesimal Lorentz transformation parametrized by wiv, we have wh wt (1+ dup. (S"”)')7°. The sum over ys and v has six distinct nonzero terms. In the rotation terms, where p and v are both nonzero, (S#”)t = St” and S#” commutes with 7°. In the boost terms, where jor v is 0, (S#”)7 = —(S#”) but S#” anticommutes with 7°. Passing the 7° to the left therefore removes the dagger from S$”, yielding the transformation law Br vAy, (3.33) and therefore the quantity 7y is a Lorentz scalar. Similarly you can show (with the aid of (3.29)) that wy"v is a Lorentz vector. The correct, Lorentz-invariant Dirac Lagrangian is therefore iy", — mv. (3.34) The Euler-Lagrange equation for & (or w") immediately yields the Dirac equa- tion in the form (3.31); the Euler-Lagrange equation for y gives the same equation, in Hermitian-conjugate form: Loirac ty" — mip (3.35) Weyl Spinors From the block-diagonal form of the generators (3.26) and (3.27), it is apparent that the Dirac representation of the Lorentz group is reducible.t We can form two 2-dimensional representations by considering each block separately, and writing b= Ge (3.36) YR, entation of the gamma matrices, ibility this is essentially the reason for using the chiral representation. 4If we had used a different repr would not be mani