Wigner's Spins, Feynman's Partons, and Their Common Ground

Abstract

The connection between spin and symmetry was established by Wigner in his 1939 paper on the Poincar\'e group. For a massive particle at rest, the little group is O(3) from which the concept of spin emerges. The little group for a massless particle is isomorphic to the two-dimensional Euclidean group with one rotational and two translational degrees of freedom. The rotational degree corresponds to the helicity, and the translational degrees to the gauge degree of freedom. The question then is whether these two different symmetries can be united. Another hard-pressing problem is Feynman's parton picture which is valid only for hadrons moving with speed close to that of light. While the hadron at rest is believed to be a bound state of quarks, the question arises whether the parton picture is a Lorentz-boosted bound state of quarks. We study these problems within Einstein's framework in which the energy-momentum relations for slow particles and fast particles are two different manifestations one covariant entity.