Physical Picture of Electron Spin

Abstract

Pauli established the standard view that the spin of the electron was a completely abstract non-classical angular momentum that could not be thought of as the rotation of anything. Here, we give a pedagogical presentation of old work by Belifante (1939), recently updated by Ohanian (1986), which shows that, contrary to Pauli’s edict, the spin of the electron can be viewed as the rotational angular momentum in the wave field of the electron.

Keywords

• spin angular momentum
• electron structure
• Dirac field