Katarzyna Suska

Ettore Majorana and his last published paper "A symmetric theory of electrons and positrons"

In 1928, Paul Dirac discovered the theoretical framework for describing spin 1/2 particles, it seemed that complex numbers were unavoidable Dirac’s original equation contained both real and imaginary numbers, and therefore it can only pertain to complex fields. Ettore Majorana In his 1937 paper posed, and answered, the question of whether equations for spin 1/2 fields must necessarily, like Dirac’s original equation, involve complex numbers. Majorana discovered that, to the contrary, there is a simple, clever modification of Dirac’s equation that involves only real numbers. With this discovery, Majorana made the idea that spin 1/2 particles could be their own antiparticles theoretically respectable, that is, consistent with the general principles of relativity and quantum theory. In our semminar we will talk about Ettore Majorana`s last 9-th published paper "A symmetric theory of electrons and positrons".