A note on Dirac spinors in a non-flat space-time of general relativity

I present a review of the Dirac equation in general relativity. Although the generalization of the Dirac equation to a curved spacetime is well known, it is not usually part of the standard toolkit of techniques known to people working on classical general relativity. Recently, there has been some renewed interest in studying solutions of the Einstein--Dirac system of equations, particularly in the context of the so-called ``Dirac stars''. Motivated by this, here I present a ...

(Talk presented at the 7th Marcel Grossmann Meeting on General Relativity, Stanford, CA, July 24-30, 1994) We study the semi-classical limit of the solution of the Dirac equation in a background electromagnetic/gravitational plane wave. We show that the exact solution corresponding to an asymptotically fixed incoming momentum satisfies constraints consistent with the classical notion of a spinning particle. In order to further analyze the motion of a spinning particle in this...

The "Spinors" software is a "Mathematica" package which implements 2-component spinor calculus as devised by Penrose for General Relativity in dimension 3+1. The "Spinors" software is part of the "xAct" system, which is a collection of "Mathematica" packages to do tensor analysis by computer. In this paper we give a thorough description of "Spinors" and present practical examples of use.

We study the quantum mechanics of a Dirac fermion on a curved spacetime manifold. The metric of the spacetime is completely arbitrary, allowing for the discussion of all possible inertial and gravitational field configurations. In this framework, we find the Hermitian Dirac Hamiltonian for an arbitrary classical external field (including the gravitational and electromagnetic ones). In order to discuss the physical content of the quantum-mechanical model, we further apply the ...

The proposal of this work is to provide an answer to the following question: is it possible to treat the metric of space-time - that in General Relativity (GR) describes the gravitational interaction - as an effective geometry? In other words, to obtain the dynamics of the metric tensor as a consequence of the dynamics of other fields. In this work we will use a slight modfication of the non-linear equation of motion of a spinor field proposed some years ago by Heisenberg, al...

Editorial Note with a mathematical and historical introduction to a 1932 paper by Erwin Schr\"odinger on the generalization of the Dirac equation to a curved spacetime -- to appear in the 'Golden Oldie' section of the Journal of General Relativity and Gravitation alongside an English translation of that paper. The Schr\"odinger paper is of interest as the first place that the well-known formula $g^{\mu\nu}\nabla_\mu\nabla_\nu + m^2 + \frac{R}{4}$ was obtained for the 'square'...

We find out classical particles, starting from Dirac quantum fields on a curved space-time, by an eikonal approximation and a localization hypothesis for amplitudes. We recover the results by Mathisson-Papapetrou, hence establishing a fundamental correspondence between the coupling of classical and quantum spinning particles with the gravitational field.

In this paper, we consider a general twisted-curved space-time hosting Dirac spinors and we take into account the Lorentz covariant polar decomposition of the Dirac spinor field: the corresponding decomposition of the Dirac spinor field equation leads to a set of field equations that are real and where spinorial components have disappeared while still maintaining Lorentz covariance. We will see that the Dirac spinor will contain two real scalar degrees of freedom, the module ...

Classical dynamics of spinning zero-size objects in an external gravitational field is derived from the conservation law of the stress-energy and spin tensors. The resulting world line equations differ from those in the existing literature. In particular, the spin of the Dirac particle does not couple to the background curvature. As a check of consistency, the wave packet solution of the free Dirac equation is considered. The resulting equations are shown to include a constra...

The Dirac equation in a curved spacetime depends on a field of coefficients (essentially the Dirac matrices), for which a continuum of different choices are possible. We study the conditions under which a change of the coefficient fields leads to an equivalent Hamiltonian operator H, or to an equivalent energy operator E. We do that for the standard version of the gravitational Dirac equation, and for two alternative equations based on the tensor representation of the Dirac f...