Abstract
This paper presents some results concerning the size of magnetic fields that support zero modes for the three-dimensional Dirac equation and related problems for spinor equations. It is a well-known fact that for the Schrödinger equation in three dimensions to have a negative energy bound state, the
Funding statement: Partial support through U.S. National Science Foundation grants DMS-1363432 and DMS-1954995 (Rupert L. Frank) and DMS-1856645 (Michael Loss) and through the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (German Research Foundation) through Germany’s Excellence Strategy EXC-2111-390814868 (Rupert L. Frank) is acknowledged.
A Some computations involving the Dirac matrices
The construction of zero modes in higher dimensions is more complicated and, as mentioned before, was accomplished by Dunne and Min [11] using information about the Dirac equation on the sphere. The advantage of their construction is that it delivers automatically the dimension of the zero mode space. If one is satisfied with less information, then there is, we believe, a simpler way to construct the Dunne–Min zero modes. Moreover, it gives the opportunity to get acquainted with some of the properties of the Dirac matrices. The basic idea is due to Adolf Hurwitz in his posthumously published paper “Über die Komposition der quadratischen Formen” [25]. In this paper he gave a complete classification of matrices
For our purpose we shall assume the matrices
Theorem A.1.
Let
Then
The proof proceeds by reducing the γ matrices to a unitarily equivalent, but canonical set of matrices using an inductive procedure. We omit the proof and refer to [25].
Corollary A.2.
Let R be a
Then there exists a unitary matrix A such that for all
The computation with γ matrices can be sometimes tedious and the following framework called “second quantization” is quite helpful.
In the remainder of this section, we assume that
We single out the matrix
so that
One easily checks that
and, for
Note that the matrix
Lemma A.3.
There exists a vector
Proof.
Since
Lemma A.4.
Let
is non-zero if and only if the indices
In view of this lemma, we will sometimes denote
Proof.
If one or more of the indices are not distinct, then by commuting the various operators results in a square of one of the
and using
The second term on the right side vanishes because the indices are distinct and thus
and hence we have
Lemma A.5.
The vacuum is unique (up to a constant phase).
Proof.
Suppose that v is another vacuum, i.e.,
We may assume that
is always zero and therefore, by Lemma A.4,
We note that
for all α. By the uniqueness result of Lemma A.5 there is a
The point about introducing this formalism is the following result.
Lemma A.6.
Introduce a
Then
where the zero is a number and there are ν
Proof.
Since ω is skew and vanishes on the diagonal, it suffices to compute
Similarly, when both are odd, we have for
Next, we consider α is even and β is odd. If
Otherwise, for
Finally, we have the case where α is odd and β is even. For
This proves the claimed formula for the entries of the matrix ω. ∎
After these preliminaries we discuss now an alternative approach to the Dunne–Min generalization [11] of [30]. The following example is relevant. It is the higher-dimensional analog of choice for the vector potential in [30]. Consider
where
This leads to the identity
which is very useful for constructing zero modes. It turns out that this identity also holds for
Things simplify considerably if we choose the constant spinor η to be the vacuum ϕ. We compute
Taking expectation we get
Since
For the component
Here ω is the
This can be written more concisely as
where
Since
In other words, the vector
is a unit vector. Now consider the self adjoint matrix
whose square is
and hence we have that
If we set
then a simple computation yields
and if we define
then
and we have constructed our zero modes.
B Generalization of the spin-field interaction term to arbitrary dimensions
Squaring the Dirac equation yields
We have
and
For each fixed
where
Here there are ν
Since the trace of B is zero, we have
Hence
If we set
then, according to Corollary A.2, there exists a unitary matrix U such that
and we can write
The matrices
with diagonal matrices
where the matrices
This fits with the three-dimensional case where
Moreover, we have
The last identity comes from the fact that conjugation by an orthogonal matrix R does not change the Hilbert–Schmidt norm of the matrix
Acknowledgements
The authors would like to thank H. Kovarik and M. Lewin for helpful remarks.
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Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Which magnetic fields support a zero mode?
- Skein lasagna modules for 2-handlebodies
- Curvature measures of pseudo-Riemannian manifolds
- Components and singularities of Quot schemes and varieties of commuting matrices
- Uniqueness of convex ancient solutions to hypersurface flows
- Level structure, arithmetic representations, and noncommutative Siegel linearization
- On tempered representations
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Which magnetic fields support a zero mode?
- Skein lasagna modules for 2-handlebodies
- Curvature measures of pseudo-Riemannian manifolds
- Components and singularities of Quot schemes and varieties of commuting matrices
- Uniqueness of convex ancient solutions to hypersurface flows
- Level structure, arithmetic representations, and noncommutative Siegel linearization
- On tempered representations