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A Dirac fermion is expressed by a four-component spinor, which is a combination of two quaternions and can be treated as an octonion. The octonion possesses the triality symmetry, which defines symmetry of fermion spinors and bosonic vector fields. The triality symmetry relates three sets of spinors and two sets of vectors, which are transformed among themselves via transformations G₂₃, G₁₂, G₁₃, G₁₂₃ and G₁₃₂. If the electromagnetic (EM) interaction is sensitive to the triality symmetry, i.e. EM probe selects one triality sector, EM signals from the five transformed world would not be detected and be treated as the dark matter. According to an astrophysical measurement, the ratio of the dark to ordinary matter in the universe as a whole is almost exactly 5. We expect quarks are insensitive to the triality, and triality will appear as three times larger flavor degrees of freedom in the lattice simulation.

A generalized quantization principle is considered, which incorporates nontrivial commutation relations of the components of the variables of the quantized theory with the components of the corresponding canonical conjugated momenta referring to other space–time directions. The corresponding commutation relations are formulated by using quaternions. At the beginning, this extended quantization concept is applied to the variables of quantum mechanics. The resulting Dirac equation and the corresponding generalized expression for plane waves are formulated and some consequences for quantum field theory are considered. Later, the quaternionic quantization principle is transferred to canonical quantum gravity. Within quantum geometrodynamics as well as the Ashtekar formalism, the generalized algebraic properties of the operators describing the gravitational observables and the corresponding quantum constraints implied by the generalized representations of these operators are determined. The generalized algebra also induces commutation relations of the several components of the quantized variables with each other. Finally, the quaternionic quantization procedure is also transferred to ${𝒩}=1$ supergravity. Accordingly, the quantization principle has to be generalized to be compatible with Dirac brackets, which appear in canonical quantum supergravity.

We argue that quaternions form a natural language for the description of quantum-mechanical wave functions with spin. We use the quaternionic spinor formalism which is in one-to-one correspondence with the usual spinor language. No unphysical degrees of freedom are admitted, in contrast to the majority of literature on quaternions. In this paper, we first build a Dirac Lagrangian in the quaternionic form, derive the Dirac equation and take the nonrelativistic limit to find the Schrödinger’s equation. We show that the quaternionic formalism is a natural choice to start with, while in the transition to the noninteracting nonrelativistic limit, the quaternionic description effectively reduces to the regular complex wave function language. We provide an easy-to-use grammar for switching between the ordinary spinor language and the description in terms of quaternions. As an illustration of the broader range of the formalism, we also derive the Maxwell’s equation from the quaternionic Lagrangian of Quantum Electrodynamics. In order to derive the equations of motion, we develop the variational calculus appropriate for this formalism.

In this paper, we propose a quaternion form of equations describing electromagnetic field in a homogeneous isotropic medium without dispersion. It is shown that by renormalizing the values of field inductions and sources, one can transform the asymmetrical Maxwell equations to a highly symmetric form. This provides a possibility to introduce the scalar and vector field potentials and represent the generalized equation for electromagnetic field in the form of a single second-order quaternionic wave equation. We demonstrate that this equation reduces to the system of ordinary hyperbolic wave equations for the field potentials and on the other hand, the same equation is equivalent to the system of Maxwell equations for renormalized field intensities. The symmetry of the renormalized Maxwell equations allows one to obtain the second-order relations for energy and momentum, as well as for Lorentz invariants of the renormalized fields, which formally have the same form as for the fields in a vacuum. In addition, the generalization of renormalized equations to the case of magnetic sources corresponding to the models of Dirac magnetic monopoles and Schwinger dyons is discussed.