Abstract
It is known that no length or time measurements are possible in sub-Planckian regions of spacetime. The Volovich hypothesis postulates that the micro-geometry of spacetime may therefore be assumed to be non-archimedean. In this letter, the consequences of this hypothesis for the structure, classification, and conformal symmetry of elementary particles, when spacetime is a flat space over a non-archimedean field such as the p-adic numbers, is explored. Both the Poincaré and Galilean groups are treated. The results are based on a new variant of the Mackey machine for projective unitary representations of semidirect product groups which are locally compact and second countable. Conformal spacetime is constructed over p-adic fields and the impossibility of conformal symmetry of massive and eventually massive particles is proved.
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Open Access This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.0), which permits any noncommercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author(s) and source are credited.
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Varadarajan, V.S., Virtanen, J. Structure, Classification, and Conformal Symmetry, of Elementary Particles over Non-Archimedean Space–Time. Lett Math Phys 89, 171–182 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11005-009-0351-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11005-009-0351-2