Localizing the Relativistic Electron

Abstract

A causally well-behaved solution of the localization problem for the free electron is given, with natural space-time transformation properties, in terms of Dirac's position operator. It is shown that, although this operator does not represent an observable in the usual sense, and has no positive-energy (generalized) eigenstates, the associated 4-vector density is observable, and can be localized arbitrarily precisely about any point in space, at any instant of time, using only positive-energy states. A suitable spin operator can be diagonalized at the same time.

19 pages including 1 figure (1 LatTex2e file, 1 postscript file). Uses package amssymb. Typos corrected

References in corpus (1)

• Instantaneous Spreading and Einstein Causality in Quantum Theory

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