In introducing second quantization for fermions, Jordan and Wigner
(1927/1928) observed that the algebra of a single pair of fermion creation and
annihilation operators in quantum mechanics is closely related to the algebra
of quaternions H. For the first time, here we exploit this fact to study
nonlinear Bogolyubov-Valatin transformations (canonical transformations for
fermions) for a single fermionic mode. By means of these transformations, a
class of fermionic Hamiltonians in an external field is related to the standard
Fermi oscillator.Comment: 6 pages REVTEX (v3: two paragraphs appended, minor stylistic changes,
eq. (39) corrected, references [10]-[14], [36], [37], [41], [67]-[69] added;
v4: few extensions, references [62], [63] added, final version to be
published in J. Phys. A: Math. Gen.