Abstract

The difficulties of relativistic particle theories formulated by means of canonical quantization, such as those of Klein–Gordon and Dirac, ultimately led theoretical physicists to turn to quantum field theory to model elementary particle physics. In order to overcome these difficulties, the theories of the present approach are developed deductively from the physical principles that specify the system, without making use of canonical quantization. For a free particle these starting assumptions are invariance of the theory and covariance of position with respect to Poincaré transformations. In pursuing the approach, the effectiveness of group theoretical methods is exploited. The coherent development of our program has shown that robust classes of representations of the Poincaré group, discarded by the known particle theories, can in fact be taken as bases for perfectly consistent theories. For massive spin zero particles, six inequivalent theories have been determined, two of which do not correspond to any of the current ones; all of these theories overcome the difficulties of Klein–Gordon one. The present lack of the explicit transformation properties of position with respect to boosts prevents the complete determination of non zero spin particle theories. In the past a particular form of these transformation properties was adopted by Jordan and Mukunda. We check its consistency within the present approach and find that for spin \ particles there is only one consistent theory, which is unitarily related to Dirac’s; yet, once again, it requires classes of irreducible representations previously discarded.