High-order Foldy-Wouthuysen transformations of the Dirac and Dirac-Pauli Hamiltonians in the weak-field limit

Abstract

The low-energy and weak-field limit of the Dirac equation can be obtained by an order-by-order block diagonalization approach to any desired order in the parameter $\ensuremath{\pi}/mc$ $(\ensuremath{\pi}$ is the kinetic momentum and $m$ is the mass of the particle). In previous work, it has been shown that, up to the order of ${(\ensuremath{\pi}/mc)}^{8}$, the Dirac-Pauli Hamiltonian in the Foldy-Wouthuysen (FW) representation may be expressed as a closed form and consistent with the classical Hamiltonian, which is the sum of the classical relativistic Hamiltonian for orbital motion and the Thomas-Bargmann-Michel-Telegdi Hamiltonian for spin precession. In order to investigate the exact validity of the correspondence between classical and Dirac-Pauli spinors, it is necessary to proceed to higher orders. In this paper, we investigate the FW representation of the Dirac and Dirac-Pauli Hamiltonians using Kutzelnigg's diagonalization method. We show that the Kutzelnigg diagonalization method can be further simplified if nonlinear effects of static and homogeneous electromagnetic fields are neglected (in the weak-field limit). Up to the order of ${(\ensuremath{\pi}/mc)}^{14}$, we find that the FW transformation for both Dirac and Dirac-Pauli Hamiltonians is in agreement with the classical Hamiltonian with the gyromagnetic ratio given by $g=2$ and $g\ensuremath{\ne}2$, respectively. Furthermore, with higher-order terms at hand, it is demonstrated that the unitary FW transformation admits a closed form in the low-energy and weak-field limit.