The KleinGordon equation is

This is often abbreviated as

where

= mc/ and is the d'Alembert operator, defined by

(We are using the (, +, +, +) metric signature.)

The Klein-Gordon equation is most often written in natural units:

The form is determined by requiring that plane wave solutions of the equation:

obey the energy momentum relation of special relativity:

Unlike the Schrdinger equation, the KleinGordon equation admits two values of for each k, one positive
and one negative. Only by separating out the positive and negative frequency parts does one obtain an
equation describing a relativistic wavefunction. For the time-independent case, the KleinGordon equation
becomes

which is the homogeneous screened Poisson equation.