A New Construction for Spinor Wave Equations

Abstract

The construction of discrete scalar wave propagation equations in arbitrary inhomogeneous media was recently achieved by using elementary dynamical processes realizing a discrete counterpart of the Huygens principle. In this paper, we generalize this approach to spinor wave propagation. Although the construction can be formulated on a discrete lattice of any dimension, for simplicity we focus on spinors living in 1+1 space-time dimensions. The Dirac equation in the Majorana-Weyl representation is directly recovered by incorporating appropriate symmetries of the elementary processes. The Dirac equation in the standard representation is also obtained by using its relationship with the Majorana-Weyl representation.