Quaternionic Quantum Mechanics and Quantum Fields (International Series of Monographs on Physics, 88)

Rating:
Summary: Does not take full advantage of quaternionic power.
Review: This book is a good example of what can be done with the quaternionic formalism to improve some treatments of theoretical physics. However, it is not more than a formal improvement, of course taking advantadge of the arithmetical properties of quaternions and their ability to represent space rotations and other transformations needed in physics, for the author misses the opportunity of using the full power of quaternions by ignoring completely quaternionic ANALYSIS. He even says that this kind of analysis is not useful for physics. He obvioulsly has not read enough on the subject.

The book is useful to learn how to REPRESENT problems by means of quaternions, but to SOLVE them you need the analysis, a feature this book lacks.

Contents: Introduction; General Framework of Quaternionic Quantum Mechanics; Further General Results in Quaternionic Quantum Mechanics; One-Particle Quantum Mechanics - General Formalism; Stationary State Methods and Phase Methods; Scattering Theory and Bound States; Methods for Time Development; Single-Channel Time-Dependent Formal Scattering Theory; Multiparticle and Multichannel Methods; Further Multiparticle Topics; Relativistic Single-Particle Wave Equations: Spin-0 and Spin-1/2; More on Relativistic Wave Equations: The Spin-1 Gauge Potential, Lagrangian Formulations, and the Poincaré Group; Quaternionic Quantum Field Theory; Outlook; 2 Appendices.

Motivates each topic though a previous knowledge of quantum mechanics is required. Extensive list of references. Nice printing quality and clothbound.