*** Welcome to piglix ***

Four vector


In special relativity, a four-vector (also known as a 4-vector) is an object with four components, which transform in a specific way under Lorentz transformations. Specifically, a four-vector is an element of a four-dimensional vector space considered as a representation space of the standard representation of the Lorentz group, the (½,½) representation. It differs from a Euclidean vector in how its magnitude is determined. The transformations that preserve this magnitude are the Lorentz transformations, which include spatial rotations, boosts (a change by a constant velocity to another inertial reference frame).

Four-vectors describe, for instance, position xμ in spacetime modeled as Minkowski space, a particle's four-momentum pμ, the amplitude of the electromagnetic four-potential Aμ(x) at a point x in spacetime, and the elements of the subspace spanned by the gamma matrices inside the Dirac algebra.

The Lorentz group may be represented by 4×4 matrices Λ. The action of a Lorentz transformation on a general contravariant four-vector X (like the examples above), regarded as a column vector with Cartesian coordinates with respect to an inertial frame in the entries, is given by


...
Wikipedia

...