Geometrical treatment of Clifford algebras and spinors with applications to the dynamics of spin particles

The algebraic structure of the real Clifford algebras (CA) of vector spaces with non-degenerated scalar product of arbitrary signature is studied, and a classification formula for this is obtained. The latter is based on three sequences of integer numbers from which one is the Radon-Harwitz sequence. A new representation method of real CA is constructed. This leads to a geometrical representation of real Clifford algebras in which the representation spaces are subspaces of the CA itself (''spinor spaces''). One of these spinor spaces is a subalgebra of the original CA. The relation between CA and external algebras is studied. Each external algebra with a scalar product possesses the structure of a CA. From the geometric representation developed here then follows that spinors are inhomogeneous external forms. The transformation behaviour of spinors under the orthogonal, as well as under the general linear group is studied. By means of these algebraic results the spinor connexion and the covariant Dirac operator on a differential manifold are introduced. In the geometrical representation a further in ternal SL(2,R) symmetry of the Dirac equation (DE) is shown. Furthermore other equivalent formulations of the DE can be obtained. Of special interest is the tetrade formulation of the DE. A generalization of the DE is introduced. The equations of motion of the classical relativistic spin particle are derived by means of spinors and CA from a variational principle. From this interesting formal analogies with the supersymmetric theories of the spin particle result. Finally the DE in the curved space-time is established and studied in the tetrade formulation. Using the methods developed here a new exact solution of the coupled Einstein-Curtan-Dirac theory was found (massice ''Ghost-Dirac fields''). (orig.)