Single twistor description of massless, massive, AdS, and other interacting particles

Abstract

The Penrose transform between twistors and the phase space of massless particles is generalized from the massless case to an assortment of other particle dynamical systems, including special examples of massless or massive particles, relativistic or nonrelativistic, interacting or noninteracting, in flat space or curved spaces. Our unified construction involves always the same twistor ${Z}^{A}$ with only four complex degrees of freedom and subject to the same helicity constraint. Only the twistor to phase space transform differs from one case to another. Hence, a unification of diverse particle dynamical systems is displayed by the fact that they all share the same twistor description. Our single twistor approach seems to be rather different and a strikingly economical construction of twistors compared to other past approaches that introduced multiple twistors to represent some similar but far more limited set of particle phase space systems.