The Mass Hyperboloid as a Poisson-Lie Group

Abstract

The light cone formalism of a massive scalar field has been shown by Dirac to have many advantages. But it is not manifestly Lorentz invariant. We will show that this is a feature not a bug: Lorentz invariance is indeed a symmetry, but in a different sense defined by Drinfel'd. The key idea is that the mass shell (mass hyperboloid) is a Poisson-Lie group: there is a non-abelian group multiplication and non-zero Poisson brackets between components of four-momentum. Rotations form the dual group of the hyperboloid in the sense of Drinfel'd. Infinitesimal Lorentz transformations form a Lie bi-algebra.

9 pages. Latex file. Contribution dedicated to A. P. Balachandran, on the occasion of his eighty-fifth birthday