Adds special relativity to the Schrödinger equation, and the following conclusions come basically as a direct consequence of this!
Experiments explained:
- spontaneous emission coefficients.
- fine structure, notably for example Dirac equation solution for the hydrogen atom
- antimatter
- particle creation and annihilation
Experiments not explained: those that quantum electrodynamics explains like:See also: Dirac equation vs quantum electrodynamics.
- Lamb shift
- TODO: quantization of the electromagnetic field as photons?
The Dirac equation is a set of 4 partial differential equations on 4 complex valued wave functions. The full explicit form in Planck units is shown e.g. in Video 1. "Quantum Mechanics 12a - Dirac Equation I by ViaScience (2015)" at youtu.be/OCuaBmAzqek?t=1010:Then as done at physics.stackexchange.com/questions/32422/qm-without-complex-numbers/557600#557600 from why are complex numbers used in the Schrodinger equation?, we could further split those equations up into a system of 8 equations on 8 real-valued functions.
Split in energy levels due to interaction between electron up or down spin and the electron orbitals.
Numerically explained by the Dirac equation when solving it for the hydrogen atom, and it is one of the main triumphs of the theory.
Used a lot in quantum mechanics, where the equations are really hard to solve. There's even a dedicated wiki page for it: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perturbation_theory_(quantum_mechanics). Notably, Feynman diagrams are a way to represent perturbation calculations in quantum field theory.
Let's gather some of the best results we come across here: