SPIN AND ELECTRON-STRUCTURE

The recent literature shows a renewed interest, with various independe nt approaches, in the classical models for spin. Considering the possi ble interest of those results, at least for the electron case, we purp ose in this paper to explore their physical and mathematical meaning, by the natural and powerful language of Clifford algebras (which, inci dentally, will allow us to unify those different approaches). In such models, the ordinary electron is in general associated to the mean mot ion of a point-like 'constituent'' Q, whose trajectory is a cylindrica l helix. We find, in particular, that the object Q obeys a new, non-li near Dirac-like equation, such that - when averaging over an internal cycle (which corresponds to linearization) - it transforms into the or dinary Dirac equation (valid, of course, for the electron as a whole).