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The Zitterbewegung or “Trembling-Along-The-Way” Electron


By Dr. Inés Urdaneta, Physicist at Resonance Science Foundation

The German word zitterbewegung -zitter- means “trembling along the way” and it was coined for the first time by Erwin Schrödinger in 1930 when studying the solutions of Dirac equations for free relativistic electrons. When analyzing the behavior of the wave packets, Schrödinger found an oscillatory term with an amplitude of the magnitude of the Compton wavelength and frequency of 2mec2/ħ., where me is the mass of the electron, c is the speed of light and ħ is the reduced Planck constant. This zitter character of the electron found by Schrodinger suggested that the electron performed an extremely-high-frequency circular motion.

As it stands, Dirac’s fully relativistic equation in the form originally proposed by Dirac [1] for a free electron, describes all spin-1/2 massive particles, and it is consistent with the principles of quantum mechanics and the theory of special relativity. The...

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Additional Commentary on the Stimulated Unruh Effect: Studying Quantum Effects in Gravitational Fields

By: William Brown, Biophysicist at the Resonance Science Foundation

In a previous article RSF physicist Dr. Ines Urdaneta discussed a proposed study for probing the Unruh effect with quantum optics [1]. Because of the importance of experiments that will probe quantum effects in gravitational fields and to further elucidate the nature of the quantum vacuum, we will take another look at this proposed experiment and expound on some of the key insights of the study.

As Dr. Urdaneta explained in the previous article, the importance of probing the Unruh effect has to do with its relationship to quantum gravitational effects via the equivalence principle first described by Albert Einstein. Einstein is well known for his seminal work on the theory of relativity, which regards the behavior of clocks and rulers under accelerating and non-accelerating frames of reference, and the relativity of simultaneity that results from the invariance of the speed of light relative to any...

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