3.5 Quantization of the Dirac Field 53 where a and b denote the spinor components of y. This already looks peculiar: If (a) were real-valued, the left-hand side would be antisymmetric under x © y, while the right-hand side is symmetric. But y is complex, so we do not have a contradiction yet. In fact, we will soon find that much worse problems arise when we impose commutation relations on the Dirac field. But it is instructive to see how far we can get, in order to better understand the relation between spin and statistics. So let us press on; just remember that the next few pages will eventually turn out to be a blind alley. Our first task is to find a representation of the commutation relations in terms of creation and annihilation operators that diagonalizes H. From the form of the Hamiltonian (3.84), it will clearly be helpful to expand (zx) in a basis of eigenfunctions of hp. We know these eigenfunctions already from our calculations in Section 3.3. There we found that [i7°do + t7-V — mjur(p)e *?* =0, so u*(p)e'P* are eigenfunctions of hp with eigenvalues Ey. Similarly, the functions v’(p)e~*?™ (or equivalently, v’(—p)e**) are eigenfunctions of hp with eigenvalues — Ey. These form a complete set of eigenfunctions, since for any p there are two u’s and two v’s, giving us four eigenvectors of the 4x 4 matrix hp. Expanding w in this basis, we obtain Bp 1px 7 yu" where af, and bg, are operator coefficients. (For now we work in the Schrédinger picture, where y does not depend on time.) Postulate the commutation rela- tions [ap, ag'] = [6% 63] = (27)°5 (p — qo’. (3.88) It is then easy to verify the commutation relations (3.86) for y and yt: @Ppdq 1 _ r it He i(P-x—q-y) wow] = | Sasa B oh x X(le5- uw (p)at(a) + [6¢p,b44}o" Cp)e"Ea))° Ppl iptx-y) (Gn)? 2B, © < [("Bp— 7p +m) + ("By +4 P= m)] 9" = 59) —y) x Ta. (3.89) In the second step we have used the spin sum completeness relations (3.66) and (3.67).