FeynCalc / feyncalc

Mathematica package for algebraic calculations in elementary particle physics.
https://feyncalc.github.io
GNU General Public License v3.0
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FermionSpinSum fails with spinor of combined momenta #167

Open ChiMaoShuPhy opened 2 years ago

ChiMaoShuPhy commented 2 years ago
vsht commented 2 years ago

I'm aware of this behavior, but I don't really see a way to fix this.

Functions that deal with spinor chains expect each spinor to depend on a single momentum like p or q. This is mainly related to the way how FeynCalc figures out whether the given Spinor is a u, v, ubar or vbar. The sign of the momentum is crucial here, cf.

https://feyncalc.github.io/FeynCalcBookDev/Spinor.html

Now if you make a spinor depend on a linear combination of momenta, all this machinery breaks down and one runs into very weird bugs, cf. https://github.com/FeynCalc/feyncalc/issues/76 The worst thing is that you'd get incorrect results without even noticing this. This is why I explicitly added a check to forbid such input.

For nonrelativistic expansions of spinor chains I advocate the approach where one first rewrites everything in terms of Pauli matrices and stuff (using FeynOnium routines) and then substitutes the decomposition of the heavy particles momenta with FCReplaceMomenta. This is how I handle this in my calculations.