The unitary representations of the Poincar´e group in any spacetime dimension Xavier Bekaert a and Nicolas Boulanger b a Institut Denis Poisson, Unit´emixte de Recherche 7013, Universit´ede Tours, Universit´ed’Orl´eans, CNRS, Parc de Grandmont, 37200 Tours (France)
[email protected] b Service de Physique de l’Univers, Champs et Gravitation Universit´ede Mons – UMONS, Place du Parc 20, 7000 Mons (Belgium)
[email protected] An extensive group-theoretical treatment of linear relativistic field equa- tions on Minkowski spacetime of arbitrary dimension D > 2 is presented in these lecture notes. To start with, the one-to-one correspondence be- tween linear relativistic field equations and unitary representations of the isometry group is reviewed. In turn, the method of induced representa- tions reduces the problem of classifying the representations of the Poincar´e group ISO(D 1, 1) to the classification of the representations of the sta- − bility subgroups only. Therefore, an exhaustive treatment of the two most important classes of unitary irreducible representations, corresponding to massive and massless particles (the latter class decomposing in turn into the “helicity” and the “infinite-spin” representations) may be performed via the well-known representation theory of the orthogonal groups O(n) (with D 4 <n<D ). Finally, covariant field equations are given for each − unitary irreducible representation of the Poincar´egroup with non-negative arXiv:hep-th/0611263v2 13 Jun 2021 mass-squared. Tachyonic representations are also examined. All these steps are covered in many details and with examples. The present notes also include a self-contained review of the representation theory of the general linear and (in)homogeneous orthogonal groups in terms of Young diagrams.