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1997 Eur. J. Phys. 18 164

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Eur. J. Phys. 18 (1997) 164–168. Printed in the UK
The mathematics of the electron’s
spin
Roger Penrose
Mathematical Institute, 24–29 St Giles’, Oxford OX1 3LB, UK
Received 11 December 1996
Abstract. The Dirac equation for the electron is central to a
considerable body of mathematics. Its essential mathematical
ingredients, namely Clifford algebras and the theory of
spinors in n dimensions have wide applications in numerous
fields. A taste of all this is supplied here.
1. Introduction
One of the most impressive and original uses of
mathematics in modern theoretical physics was Paul
Dirac’s discovery of the wave equation for the electron
by taking of a ‘square root’ of the D’Alembertian
operator. In this way, he was able to accommodate the
electron’s spin, with its correct value of 12 in units of
h̄, in a natural and almost automatic way (Dirac 1928).
The Dirac equation is, indeed, one of the cornerstones
of modern theoretical physics. Its properties led Dirac
to predict the existence of anti-particles. When taken
together with the Maxwell electromagnetic equations
and the principles of quantum field theory it provides
a scheme of extraordinary power and accuracy—
quantum electrodynamics—having a precision of some
11 decimal places.
I shall not be concerned with such physical
implications of Dirac’s theory here. Instead, I
shall touch upon some of the important mathematical
connotations of the Dirac equation, the significance of
which may not be widely appreciated by physicists or
physics teachers.
2. Clifford algebras
To start, let us turn back to the 19th century. In 1843,
in his attempts to generalize the notion of a complex
number, so that it applied to three-dimensional space
rather than just to the two dimensions of the complex
plane, the Irish mathematician and physicist William
Rowan Hamilton discovered what he called the algebra
of quaternions. (Apparently, the German mathematician
Carl Friedrich Gauss had already found these quantities
0143-0807/97/030164+05$19.50
c 1997 IOP Publishing Ltd & The European Physical Society
PII: S0143-0807(97)80250-4
Résumé. L’équation de Dirac pour l’électron est au centre
d’une partie importante de mathématiques. Ses ingrédients
mathématiques essentiels, c’est à dire les algèbres de Clifford
et la théorie de spineurs en dimension n, ont de larges
applications dans nombre de disciplines. Ici l’on tâche de les
faire goûter.
somewhat earlier, but he had not published his result.)
The algebra of quaternions consists of objects built up
from—i.e. generated by—ordinary real-number algebra
and the additional three basic elements i, j, and k, these
being subject to the laws
i2 = −I, j2 = −I, k2 = −I,
ij = −ji = k, jk = −kj = i, ki = −ik = j,
where I is the identity element of the algebra. The
elements i, j, and k are said to anti-commute. The
general quaternion is an expression of the form
q = sI + xi + yj + zk,
where s, x, y and z are ordinary real numbers. This
is a division algebra, in the sense that every non-zero
quaternion q has an inverse q −1 satisfying q −1 q =
qq −1 = I. The ordinary algebra of three dimensional
vectors can be expressed very easily in terms of
quaternions.
There is, unfortunately, the drawback that quaternions
are specific to the geometry of three-dimensional
Euclidean space. However, a generalization of the
quaternion algebra was introduced in 1878 by the
brilliant but short-lived English geometer William
Kingdon Clifford. A Clifford algebra is generated by
n anti-commuting elements
γ1, γ2 . . . , γn, (γ i )2 = −I
γ i γj = −γj γ i ,
for each i, j = 1, 2, . . . , n, which extend the list
of three quantities i, j, k generating the system of
quaternions (see Brauer and Weyl 1935, Budinich and
Trautman 1988 and Penrose 1986, Appendix, for further
information). Now, however, the product of two of
164
 The mathematics of the electron’s spin
the γs is not another quantity of the same kind, which
relates to the fact that, in four or higher dimensions,
there is no invariant notion of ‘cross product’ of a pair
of vectors to produce another vector. Instead, it is more
appropriate to think of this ‘cross product’ as providing
a mathematical representation of the (oriented) plane
element spanned by the two vectors (which is, in a
sense, the more ‘correct’ way to think of a cross product
in three dimensions in any case).
In fact, even earlier than Clifford, in 1844, the
German high school teacher Hermann Grassmann found
an algebra which generalizes to n dimensions the normal
vector algebra of three dimensions. Grassman’s algebra
differs from Clifford’s only in that the relation (γ i )2 =
−1, given above, is replaced by (γ i )2 = 0. Whereas
linear combinations of the γs give objects with the
geometrical interpretation of vectors (quantities with
direction and magnitude), the product of two γs is
an object with the interpretation of a plane element
(oriented, and with the magnitude of an area). Likewise,
the product of three γs has the interpretation of a volume
element, and so on.
The Clifford algebra is somewhat richer than the
Grassmann algebra, and in fact one can extract
the Grassmann algebra from the Clifford algebra by
considering only the anti-symmetrical elements of the
algebra
γ [i γj . . . γ m] ,
where the square brackets around the indices denote
anti-symmetrization, e.g.
γ [i γj ] = 12 (γ i γj − γj γ i ),
γ [i γj γ k] = 16 (γ i γj γ k − γj γ i γ k − γ i γ k γj
+γj γ k γ i + γ k γ i γj − γ k γj γ i ).
In fact, all the elements of the Clifford algebra are
linear combinations of such anti-symmetrical elements,
of which there are precisely 2n independent ones all
together (since there are just n!/r!(n − r)! independent
such objects with r anti-symmetric indices). This comes
about because of identities of the form
γ i γj = γ [i γj ] − gij I
γ i γj γ k = γ [i γj γ k] − gij γ k + gik γj − gj k γ i ,
etc, where gij = diag(1, 1, . . . , 1).
Employing the ‘metric tensor’ gij , we can, in fact,
write the entire set of Clifford relations succinctly as
γ i γj + γj γ i = −2gij I.
This has the advantage that we can generalize the notion
of Clifford algebra to non-positive-definite metrics
such as that appropriate to ordinary four-dimensional
spacetime, for which I shall adopt the signature −2, so
that
gij = diag(+1, −1, −1, −1)
in flat spacetime, with respect to ordinary Minkowskian
coordinates. Unlike the quanternion algebra, the
Clifford algebras (for n > 2) are not division algebras,
165
so there is now no advantage in requiring that our metric
tensor gij be positive definite, i.e. that the squares of
the γs all be equal to −1, with respect to the original
choice gij = diag(1, 1, . . . , 1). In our Minkowskian
case, labelling the γs as γ 0 , γ 1 , γ 2 , γ 3 , we shall now
have
(γ 0 )2 = −I, (γ 1 )2 = +I,
(γ 2 )2 = +I, (γ 3 )2 = +I.
We can also generalize this, without difficulty, to curved
spacetime.
3. The Dirac equation
what does this have to do with electrons? The key
property of Clifford algebras that Dirac used—in fact,
he rediscovered it, being unaware of Clifford’s earlier
work on this
 very thing—is that if we define the ‘Dirac
operator’ ∇ by

∇ = γ a ∇a ,
then we have
2  
∇ = ∇∇ = γ a γ b ∇a ∇b = −,
where  is the D’Alembertian operator, defined by
 = ∇a ∇ a = gab ∇ a ∇ b ,
the usual gradient operator ∇a being defined by
∂
∇a = .
∂x a

Thus, the Dirac operator ∇ is indeed the square root
of the D’Alembertian  (apart from the sign, which is
merely conventional, and is a result of my choice of
negative signature for gij ). 
We must ask what the operator ∇ actually operates
on. To understand this, we need to know what sort
of ‘things’ the elements of the Clifford algebra act
on. In Clifford’s scheme, these things would have
been other elements of the Clifford algebra, but in
the context of quantum mechanics, which was Dirac’s
specific interest, we think of these things as quantum
state-vectors or, in Dirac’s terminology, ket vectors
|ψi. Dirac looked upon the elements of the Clifford
algebra as quantum operators acting on such kets. In
some explicit coordinate frame, these operators would
be represented by matrices, here called ‘Dirac matrices’
and the kets would be ‘column vectors’. How big would
these matrices have to be? The smallest size they can
be, in the case of ordinary spacetime, is 4 × 4. Recall
that the dimension of the Clifford algebra, in the case
of an n-dimensional space, is 2n . Here, n = 4, so
2n = 16. The number of independent (4 × 4) matrices
(i.e. the number of elements of such a matrix is indeed
4 × 4 = 16, so the numbers check).
Note that the ‘4’ that is the dimension of the
spacetime is a ‘different 4’ from that which occurs in
166 R Penrose
the size of the Dirac matrices. In the case of a six-
dimensional spacetime, for example, the size of the
Dirac matrices would be 8 × 8, since 8 × 8 = 26 . For a
2n-dimensional spacetime, it would be 2n × 2n .
What happens if the dimension of the spacetime is
odd, say (2n + 1)-dimensional? Consider the quantity
η = γ 0 γ 1 . . . γ 2n .
It is easy to see that η, actually commutes with
every other element of the Clifford algebra, so we can
represent it by a scalar (in fact, by one of the numbers
±1 or ±i, the first pair of possibilities being relevant
when the signature of the spacetime is congruent to 1
mod 4 and the second, when it is congruent to 3 mod 4).
This implies that any element α of the Clifford algebra
will be represented by the same matrix as ηα (up to
a possible sign or factor i), so the number of linearly
independent matrices in the representation need only be
1
2
× 22n+1 = 2n × 2n , whence the Dirac matrices actually
turn out to be of size 2n × 2n .
What then, are these ‘things’ that the Dirac
matrices—or, more abstractly, the Clifford algebra
elements—actually operate on? They are called spinors,
for the good reason that in the Dirac equation, for
the normal spacetime case, the Clifford elements act
upon the ket vector |ψi representing the electron’s state.
The four components of |ψi incorporate the degrees of
freedom involved in the electron’s spin.
The free Dirac equation can be written
 5. Calculus of 2-spinors
(∇ + m)|ψi = 0,
where I have chosen units so that the speed of light
c = 1 and Dirac’s form of Planck’s constant h̄ =
1. Moreover, as is the usual practice, I have also
suppressed the appearance of the identity Clifford
element I (which should strictly multiply the electron
mass m), and I shall continue to suppress it henceforth.
Note that
  2
0 = (∇ − m)(∇ + m)|ψi = (∇ − m2 )|ψi
= − ( + m2 )|ψi.
The vanishing of ( + m2 )|ψi is the assertion that |ψi
indeed describes a free particle of mass m.
4. Reduced spinors
The four-component entity |ψi is usually referred to as
a Dirac spinor. Why does it have four components,
when the spin of the electron, having the value 12 , has
only two components? An answer often given to this
question is that this doubling arises because the Dirac
equation describes both the electron and the positron at
the same time. However, I think this is a somewhat
misleading way of stating things, and I prefer looking
at the Dirac equation in a slightly different way.
Recall the quantity η that commutes with all the
Clifford elements when the spacetime dimension is odd.
In the case of 2n dimensions, we can still define
η = γ 0 γ 1 . . . γ 2n−1 ,
but we now find that η anti-commutes with each of
γ 0 , γ 1 , . . . , γ 2n−1 . Thus, algebraically, η is on a similar
footing to each of the γs. Indeed, people might
sometimes write γ 2n for η and, in the spacetime case,
γ 5 is the usual physicist’s notation (the ‘γ 0 ’ being not
always used). We have
η 2 = ±1,
the plus sign holding when the signature is a multiple of
4 and the minus sign when it is not. In the first case, η
has eigenvalues ±1, and in the second case, ±i. Thus,
(idempotent) operators
1 ∓ η,
for signature a multiple of 4, or
1 ± iη
for signature not a multiple of 4, serve to reduce
the space of spinors—called spin-space—to half the
dimensionality that it had before. The eigenvectors
of these operators are called reduced spinors. The
dimension of the reduced spin-space for a spacetime
of dimension 2n is 2n−1 , where we recall that the
dimension of unreduced spin-space is 2n . In the case
when the number of spacetime dimensions is the odd
number 2n + 1, the spin-space does not reduce, and has
dimension 2n , as described above.
In the case of ordinary four-dimensional spacetime, with
signature −2, we have a two-dimensional reduced spin-
space. Such reduced spinors are referred to as 2-spinors
(or sometimes Weyl spinors, the unreduced 4-spinors
being frequently called Dirac spinors). In fact, 2-spinors
can be used to provide a powerful calculus for the study
of spacetime geometry. This comes about because a 2-
spinor may be regarded as, in some sense, a square-root
of a spacetime vector. More correctly, it is the future-
pointing null vectors which admit a kind of square root
in this sense. Let us see how this comes about.
Let V be a spacetime 4-vector, with components
(T , X, Y, Z) in a standard coordinate system (with c =
1). Consider the matrix
1  T + Z X + iY 
√ .
2 X − iY T − Z
This is Hermitian, and it is positive definite if V is
future-timelike. If the index notation V a is used for
the components of V , then the corresponding notation
0
V AA would be used for the components of the matrix.
Here the index A, referring to the rows of the matrix,
labels the components for the reduced spin-space, and
the primed index A0 , referring to the columns of the
matrix, labels the components of the complex conjugate
reduced spin-space. (The ‘reduced spin-space’ and
its ‘complex conjugate’ here refer to the two possible
choices of eigenvalue ±i for the quantity η, i.e. to
the two different types of 2-spinor.) The translation of
 The mathematics of the electron’s spin
spacetime vector or tensor quantities into 2-spinor form
amounts to replacing each tensor index a, b, c, etc by its
corresponding pair of 2-spinor indices AA0 , BB 0 , CC 0 ,
etc.
Although this looks at first like a complication,
great simplifications can arise because two-dimensional
things are simpler to handle than four-dimensional ones;
moreover, the spin-spaces are complex, and complex
spaces have a simpler algebra than do real ones. The
power of the 2-spinor algebra frequently stems from
the fact that the spinor indices can be manipulated
separately in a simple fashion, and the corresponding
tensor operations that these manipulations encode are
often exceedingly obscure and complicated (see van der
Waerden 1929, Penrose and Rindler 1984, 1986).
Now consider the case when V is a future-pointing
null vector, so it points along the future light cone in
spacetime. Then we have
T 2 − X 2 − Y 2 − Z 2 = 0, T > 0.
This tells us that the corresponding matrix has rank 1
and is non-negative definite, whence it is the product
of some column vector with the row vector which is
its conjugate transpose. In index-notation form, we can
write this
0 0
V AA = λA λ̄A ,
0
for some 2-spinor λA , where λ̄A is its complex
conjugate. This is the ‘square-root’ operation referred
to above. It also tells us that 2-spinors can be directly
use to label the points of future light cones. There is
an additional phase contained in the 2-spinor λ, whose
components are λA , because the phase freedom
λA → eiθ λA
does not affect V . In fact, λ can be represented, up
to a sign, as a flag on the light cone, and this phase
transformation corresponds to the rotation of the flag
plane about the (null) flagpole through 2θ. The details
of this will not be entered into here.
In 2-spinor notation, the Dirac equation for the
electron can now be written as the pair of 2-spinor
equations
0 0
∇AA0 αA = −µβA0 and ∇ AA βA = µαA ,
where the Dirac 4-spinor is now split into√ the two
2-spinors αA and βA0 and where m = µ 2. The
2-spinor notation enables us to write, very simply, the
Weyl equation for the neutrino:
∇AA0 αA = 0.
As a consequence, αA satisfies
αA = 0,
showing that the equation describes a massless particle.
(Mathematicians sometimes refer to this equation as
the ‘Dirac equation’—which is, in a certain sense,
correct, because Dirac found this equation first (cf
Dirac 1982), before discarding it in favour of his
electron equation because no spin- 12 massless reflection
167
asymmetric particle was known at the time; all these
properties are now thought to apply to the neutrino.) We
now see that the two parts of the Dirac 4-spinor each
behave like ‘neutrinos’, but with the other one as a kind
of ‘source’. These are the left-handed and right-handed
components of the electron’s wavefunction.
The 2-spinor calculus is valuable also in other
contexts, one of these being Einstein’s general relativity.
Here, the ‘graviton’ is a spin-2 object. Indeed, 2-spinors
turn out to be useful for describing objects of higher spin
(Dirac 1936). Instead of having a quantity with just one
2-spinor index, for spin 12 n, one can use an n-index
spinor quantity ψAB...N with n symmetrical indices. A
useful decomposition now applies:
ψ AB...N = α(A β B . . . ν N ) ,
where the parentheses around the indices denote sym-
metrization. Since each of the 2-spinors αA , β B . . . , ν N
determines a direction along the light cone, we have an
elegant geometrical interpretation of ψ AB...N in terms of
an unordered set of n null directions. This is useful in
many contexts. (In particular, it gives a direct way of
deriving an ingenious, but not very well known, rep-
resentation of higher spin states obtained by Majorana
(1932).)
6. Further remarks about spinors
Higher-dimensional spinors also turn out to have
numerous applications. One of these is to the twistor
theory of flat Minkowski 4-space, which can be viewed
as the theory of reduced spinors for a ‘spacetime’ of
dimension 6 and signature −2. Here, the ordinary four-
dimensional spacetime is the space of ‘light rays’ along
a ‘light cone’, in the six-dimensional space. The reduced
spinors for this 6-space have four complex components,
and are referred to as twistors. Spinors of much higher
numbers of dimensions are also used in other physical
theories, such as in string theory.
There are also important applications in pure
mathematics. Perhaps the most noteworthy is in
the Atiyah–Singer index theorem. This is something
that applies to differential equations and various
generalizations in a very comprehensive manner. Very
roughly speaking, what Atiyah and Singer studied was
what happens when differential equations are varied
continuously, and they showed that certain things remain
unchanged under such variation. As part of their
general theory, the higher-dimensional Dirac equations
(or, rather, what the physicists call ‘Weyl neutrino
equations’, as described above) play a particular role—
in the sense that all other equations can be continuously
broken down into combinations of them.
All these things spring from the remarkable equation
satisfied by the humble electron (and its massless cousin,
the neutrino—if indeed the actual neutrino has no mass).
This is an excellent example of the great richness so
often found in the mathematics of the laws of Nature.
168 R Penrose

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