'A monumental achievement - one of the great scientific biographies.' Michael Frayn The Strangest Man is the Costa Biography Award-winning account of Paul Dirac, the famous physicist sometimes called the British Einstein. He was one of the leading pioneers of the greatest revolution in twentieth-century science: quantum mechanics. The youngest theoretician ever to win the Nobel Prize for Physics, he was also pathologically reticent, strangely literal-minded and legendarily unable to communicate or empathize. Through his greatest period of productivity, his postcards home contained only remarks about the weather.Based on a previously undiscovered archive of family papers, Graham Farmelo celebrates Dirac's massive scientific achievement while drawing a compassionate portrait of his life and work. Farmelo shows a man who, while hopelessly socially inept, could manage to love and sustain close friendship.The Strangest Man is an extraordinary and moving human story, as well as a study of one of the most exciting times in scientific history. 'A wonderful book . . . Moving, sometimes comic, sometimes infinitely sad, and goes to the roots of what we mean by truth in science.' Lord Waldegrave, Daily Telegraph

The first full length biography of Dirac, one of the most brilliant physicists of the twentieth century.

The first edition of this work appeared in 1930, and its originality won it immediate recognition as a classic of modern physical theory. The fourth edition has been bought out to meet a continued demand. Some improvements have been made, the main one being the complete rewriting of the chapter on quantum electrodymanics, to bring in electron-pair creation. This makes it suitable as an introduction to recent works on quantum field theories.

Paul Dirac, who died in 1984, was without question one of the greatest physicists of the twentieth century. His revolutionary contribution to modern quantum theory is remembered for its insight and creativity. He is especially famous for his prediction of the magnetic moment and spin of the electron and for the existence of antiparticles. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for physics in 1933 at the age of 31. In this memorial volume, 24 of Dirac's friends, colleagues and contemporaries remember him with affection. There are chapters describing Dirac's personality, and many anecdotes about the man with a reputation for silence. Other chapters describe Dirac's science and its impact on modern physics.

Ever since its invention in 1929 the Dirac equation has played a fundamental role in various areas of modern physics and mathematics. Its applications are so widespread that a description of all aspects cannot be done with sufficient depth within a single volume. In this book the emphasis is on the role of the Dirac equation in the relativistic quantum mechanics of spin-1/2 particles. We cover the range from the description of a single free particle to the external field problem in quantum electrodynamics. Relativistic quantum mechanics is the historical origin of the Dirac equation and has become a fixed part of the education of theoretical physicists. There are some famous textbooks covering this area. Since the appearance of these standard texts many books (both physical and mathematical) on the non relativistic Schrodinger equation have been published, but only very few on the Dirac equation. I wrote this book because I felt that a modern, comprehensive presentation of Dirac's electron theory satisfying some basic requirements of mathematical rigor was still missing.

This volume surveys the spectral properties of the spin Dirac operator. After a brief introduction to spin geometry, it presents the main known estimates for Dirac eigenvalues on compact manifolds with or without boundaries.

This monograph gives a comprehensive treatment of spectral (linear) stability of weakly relativistic solitary waves in the nonlinear Dirac equation. It turns out that the instability is not an intrinsic property of the Dirac equation that is only resolved in the framework of the second quantization with the Dirac sea hypothesis. Whereas general results about the Dirac-Maxwell and similar equations are not yet available, we can consider the Dirac equation with scalar self-interaction, the model first introduced in 1938. In this book we show that in particular cases solitary waves in this model may be spectrally stable (no linear instability). This result is the first step towards proving asymptotic stability of solitary waves. The book presents the necessary overview of the functional analysis, spectral theory, and the existence and linear stability of solitary waves of the nonlinear Schrödinger equation. It also presents the necessary tools such as the limiting absorption principle and the Carleman estimates in the form applicable to the Dirac operator, and proves the general form of the Dirac-Pauli theorem. All of these results are used to prove the spectral stability of weakly relativistic solitary wave solutions of the nonlinear Dirac equation.

Four concise, brilliant lectures on mathematical methods in quantum mechanics from Nobel Prize–winning quantum pioneer build on idea of visualizing quantum theory through the use of classical mechanics.

This fifteenth volume of the Poincare Seminar Series, Dirac Matter, describes the surprising resurgence, as a low-energy effective theory of conducting electrons in many condensed matter systems, including graphene and topological insulators, of the famous equation originally invented by P.A.M. Dirac for relativistic quantum mechanics. In five highly pedagogical articles, as befits their origin in lectures to a broad scientific audience, this book explains why Dirac matters. Highlights include the detailed "Graphene and Relativistic Quantum Physics", written by the experimental pioneer, Philip Kim, and devoted to graphene, a form of carbon crystallized in a two-dimensional hexagonal lattice, from its discovery in 2004-2005 by the future Nobel prize winners Kostya Novoselov and Andre Geim to the so-called relativistic quantum Hall effect; the review entitled "Dirac Fermions in Condensed Matter and Beyond", written by two prominent theoreticians, Mark Goerbig and Gilles Montambaux, who consider many other materials than graphene, collectively known as "Dirac matter", and offer a thorough description of the merging transition of Dirac cones that occurs in the energy spectrum, in various experiments involving stretching of the microscopic hexagonal lattice; the third contribution, entitled "Quantum Transport in Graphene: Impurity Scattering as a Probe of the Dirac Spectrum", given by Hélène Bouchiat, a leading experimentalist in mesoscopic physics, with Sophie Guéron and Chuan Li, shows how measuring electrical transport, in particular magneto-transport in real graphene devices - contaminated by impurities and hence exhibiting a diffusive regime - allows one to deeply probe the Dirac nature of electrons. The last two contributions focus on topological insulators; in the authoritative "Experimental Signatures of Topological Insulators", Laurent Lévy reviews recent experimental progress in the physics of mercury-telluride samples under strain, which demonstrates that the surface of a three-dimensional topological insulator hosts a two-dimensional massless Dirac metal; the illuminating final contribution by David Carpentier, entitled "Topology of Bands in Solids: From Insulators to Dirac Matter", provides a geometric description of Bloch wave functions in terms of Berry phases and parallel transport, and of their topological classification in terms of invariants such as Chern numbers, and ends with a perspective on three-dimensional semi-metals as described by the Weyl equation. This book will be of broad general interest to physicists, mathematicians, and historians of science.

This monograph contains a functional analytic introduction to Dirac's formalism. The first part presents some new mathematical notions in the setting of triples of Hilbert spaces, mentioning the concept of Dirac basis. The second part introduces a conceptually new theory of generalized functions, integrating the notions of the first part.The last part of the book is devoted to a mathematical interpretation of the main features of Dirac's formalism. It involves a pairing between distributional bras and kets, continuum expansions and continuum matrices.