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According to the theory of the Dirac sea, developed by Paul Dirac in 1930, the vacuum of space is full of negative energy. This theory was developed to explain the anomaly of negative-energy quantum states predicted by the Dirac equation. A year later, after work by Weyl, the negative energy concept was abandoned and replaced by a theory of ...
The Dirac sea is a theoretical model of the electron vacuum as an infinite sea of electrons with negative energy, now called positrons. It was first postulated by the British physicist Paul Dirac in 1930 [1] to explain the anomalous negative-energy quantum states predicted by the relativistically-correct Dirac equation for electrons. [2]
To cope with disagreements, the vacuum energy is described as a virtual energy potential of positive and negative energy. [93] In quantum perturbation theory, it is sometimes said that the contribution of one-loop and multi-loop Feynman diagrams to elementary particle propagators are the contribution of vacuum fluctuations, or the zero-point ...
In quantum field theory, a Bogoliubov transformation on the creation and annihilation operators (turning an occupied negative-energy electron state into an unoccupied positive energy positron state and an unoccupied negative-energy electron state into an occupied positive energy positron state) allows us to bypass the Dirac sea formalism even ...
Energy levels for an electron in an atom: ground state and excited states. After absorbing energy, an electron may jump from the ground state to a higher-energy excited state. The ground state of a quantum-mechanical system is its stationary state of lowest energy; the energy of the ground state is known as the zero-point energy of the system.
In quantum field theory, the quantum vacuum state (also called the quantum vacuum or vacuum state) is the quantum state with the lowest possible energy. Generally, it contains no physical particles. The term zero-point field is sometimes used as a synonym for the vacuum state of a quantized field which is completely individual. [clarification ...
The Dirac equation still predicts negative energy solutions, [6] [24] so Dirac postulated that negative energy states are always occupied, because according to the Pauli principle, electronic transitions from positive to negative energy levels in atoms would be forbidden. See Dirac sea for details.
Other excited states are unstable and will decay into stable (but not other unstable) bound states with less energy by emitting a photon. A positronium "atom" is an unstable bound state of an electron and a positron. It decays into photons. Any state in the quantum harmonic oscillator is bound, but has positive energy. Note that () =, so the ...