The Landau-Dirac operator with shell interactions: self-adjointness and clustering

Abstract: We consider the two-dimensional Dirac operator with constant magnetic field that is perturbed by a combination of electrostatic and Lorentz-scalar delta interactions with variable coefficients supported on a smooth closed curve. Self-adjointness is studied in the so called non critical and critical cases. In the non-critical case the essential spectrum is unchanged - it remains to be the set of the Landau-Dirac levels, the eigenvalues of infinite multiplicity of the unperturbed operator - while in the critical case an additional interval of essential spectrum emerges in the spectral gap containing zero. Our main result concerns the discrete spectrum in the non-critical case: using the pseudodifferential properties of the involved boundary integral operators, we show that the eigenvalues accumulate at each Landau-Dirac level at a rate governed by the logarithmic capacity of the curve. A novel and surprising phenomenon is the change in the side of the accumulation depending on the position relative to the critical value. As a byproduct, clusters of eigenvalues for a family of exterior boundary value problems are obtained via confining couplings; the infinite-mass boundary condition arises as a special case.