Book Description

This book shows that with minimal modifications of postulates of non-relativistic quantum mechanics to allow for non-unitary representations of symmetry groups (Lorentz group in particular), one achieves a fully relativistic quantum theory without any of the issues (like negative energies, etc.) that led to the second quantization and QFT. It is shown that quite a few phenomena in elementary particle physics (like for example neutral kaon mixing, CP symmetry and it's supposed breaking) can be explained purely as a consequence of relativistic invariance and relativistic invariance alone. It is shown that by categorizing mesons via the representation of Lorentz group they belong to, one can explain a lot of their properties, as well as a lot of discrepancies in the particle data tables. It is also shown that based on properties of Lorentz representations of products of meson decays, a lot of excited states listed in PDG tables are really several different excitations with similar masses. Relativistic treatment of bound states in momentum space is developed and used to calculate decay widths of various composite particles like Positronium or mesons, and then those decay widths are used to calculate various properties of quarks (like their masses or charges) that were previously misunderstood. In particular, it is shown that quarks are actually quite heavy (around 3.5GeV for up/down quarks) and that while Lorentz invariance allows both fractional values (2/3, -1/3) as well as integer values (2,1), based on (very sparse) available experimental data, integer quark charges are more consistent with observed decay widths than fractional charges.