John Baez had a weblog long before the term was even invented, and for many years now has been consistently putting out interesting current material about math and physics under the title This Week’s Finds in Mathematical Physics. The latest edition has a beautiful explanation of the structure of modules of the Clifford algebra.
Traditionally one thinks about geometry in n-dimensions in terms of n-dimensional vectors and tensors built by taking tensor products of vectors. These are all representations of the general linear group GL(n), or if one has a metric, the othogonal group SO(n) of transformations that preserve the metric. However, it turns out that there are representations more fundamental than vectors, the spinor representations. These require a metric for their definition, and are projective representations of SO(n), or true representations of the double-cover Spin(n). When one tries to construct spinors, one quickly runs into a fundamental algebraic structure associated with a real n-dimensional vector space: the Clifford algebra C(n). Spinors occur as “modules” of the Clifford algebra, i.e. vector spaces that the Clifford algebra acts on. The structure of these possible Clifford modules is rather intricate, with a certain eight-fold periodicity. Baez gives a beautiful explanation of part of this story.
Physicists generally complexify everything in sight (i.e. assume all numbers are complex), which makes things much simpler. Then the story is periodic with period 2 instead of 8, and Clifford algebras are just one or two copies of a complex matrix algebra of k by k matrices, where k is some power of 2. Clifford modules (including the spinors) in this case are just complex vector spaces of dimension k, and tensors built out of these. One good place to read about all this, together with its relation to the index theorem, is in the book “Spin Geometry” by Lawson and Michelson, but there are by now lots of others.
If one believes in a deep relation between physics and geometry, these Clifford modules should somehow come into play in the structure of the most fundamental physical theories. To some extent this is already in evidence in the way spinors and the Dirac operator occur in the standard model. There are also tantalizing relations between the idea of supersymmetry and the Clifford algebra story. Many, many people have been motivated by this kind of idea over the years to try and use Clifford algebras to come up with a fundamental particle theory, one that would explain the structure of the standard model. While some of these attempts have very interesting features, none of them yet seems to me to have gotten to the heart of the matter and used this kind of geometry to give a really convincing explanation of how it is related to the standard model. Some crucial idea still seems to be missing.