How Electrons Spin

Abstract

There are a number of reasons to think that the electron cannot truly be spinning. Given how small the electron is generally taken to be, it would have to rotate superluminally to have the right angular momentum and magnetic moment. Also, the electron's gyromagnetic ratio is twice the value one would expect for an ordinary classical rotating charged body. These obstacles can be overcome by examining the flow of mass and charge in the Dirac field (interpreted as giving the classical state of the electron). Superluminal velocities are avoided because the electron's mass and charge are spread over sufficiently large distances that neither the velocity of mass flow nor the velocity of charge flow need to exceed the speed of light. The electron's gyromagnetic ratio is twice the expected value because its charge rotates twice as fast as its mass.

post-publication version, 29 pages, 2 figures

References in corpus (5)

• Bell-Type Quantum Field Theories
• Pilot-wave theory and quantum fields
• Electromagnetism as Quantum Physics
• Electron Spin or "Classically Non-Describable Two-Valuedness"
• Forces on Fields

Cited by in corpus (10)

• Difference between angular momentum and pseudoangular momentum
• The Fundamentality of Fields
• Electron Charge Density: A Clue from Quantum Chemistry for Quantum Foundations
• Eliminating Electron Self-Repulsion
• The Mass of the Gravitational Field
• Particles, Fields, and the Measurement of Electron Spin
• Putting Positrons into Classical Dirac Field Theory
• The Disappearance and Reappearance of Potential Energy in Classical and Quantum Electrodynamics
• How Anomalous is the Electron's Magnetic Moment?
• Possibility of Small Electron States