Symmetries of the Point Particle

Abstract: We study point particles to illustrate the various symmetries such as the Poincaré group and its non-relativistic version. In order to find the Noether charges and the Noether currents, which are conserved under physical symmetries, we study Noether’s theorem. We describe the Pauli-Lubanski spin vector, which is invariant under the Poincaré group and describes the spin of a particle in field theory. By promoting the Pauli-Lubanski spin vector to an operator in the quantized theory we will see that it describes the spin of a particle. Moreover, we find an action for a smooth spinning bosonic particle by compactifying one string dimension together with one embedding dimension. As with the Pauli-Lubanski spin vector, we need to quantize this action to confirm that it is the action for a smooth spinning particle.