Huygens’ principle and Dirac-Weyl equation

Saverio Pascazio; Francesco V. Pepe; Juan Manuel Pérez-Pardo

doi:10.1140/epjp/i2017-11593-6

EPJ

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2022 Impact factor 3.4

EPJ PLUS - Condensed Matter and Complex Systems

Eur. Phys. J. Plus (2017) 132: 287
https://doi.org/10.1140/epjp/i2017-11593-6

Regular Article

Huygens’ principle and Dirac-Weyl equation

Saverio Pascazio¹^,2^,3^*, Francesco V. Pepe²^,4 and Juan Manuel Pérez-Pardo⁵

¹ Dipartimento di Fisica and MECENAS, Università di Bari, I-70126, Bari, Italy
² INFN, Sezione di Bari, I-70126, Bari, Italy
³ Istituto Nazionale di Ottica (INO-CNR), I-50125, Firenze, Italy
⁴ Museo Storico della Fisica e Centro Studi e Ricerche “Enrico Fermi”, I-00184, Roma, Italy
⁵ Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, 28911, Madrid, Spain

^* e-mail: saverio.pascazio@ba.infn.it

Received: 16 May 2017
Accepted: 18 May 2017
Published online: 30 June 2017

Abstract

We investigate the validity of Huygens’ principle for forward propagation in the massless Dirac-Weyl equation. The principle holds for odd space dimension n, while it is invalid for even n. We explicitly solve the cases and 3 and discuss generic n. We compare with the massless Klein-Gordon equation and comment on possible generalizations and applications.