Ground states for nonlinear Maxwell-Dirac system with magnetic field (Q743222)

This study is dedicated to a system of equations, the so-called Maxwell-Dirac system with magnetic field and general nonlinearity of the form (1.1) in the paper. The Maxwell-Dirac system describes the interaction of a particle with its self-generated electromagnetic field. It plays an important role in quantum electrodynamics. Also it has been used as effective theories in atomic, nuclear and gravitational physics. The authors seek a stationary solution of the system (1.1) in the form of harmonic functions and then the system (1.1) is transformed into an equivalent system of the form (1.2). Thus, the main objective of this study becomes to demonstrate the existence of ground state solutions of system (1.2). In other words, the authors are interested in those solutions which correspond to the least energy for the energy functional of system (1.2). It should be noted that for a Maxwell-Dirac system the previous methods can not be used to demonstrate the existence of solutions. For instance, the mountain pass structure is no longer satisfied because the associated energy functional is strongly indefinite, and the classical critical point theory cannot be applied directly. On the other hand, the main difficulty when dealing with this problem is the lack of compactness of Sobolev embedding, hence the present problem poses more challenges in the calculus of variation in nature. In order to overcome these difficulties, the authors's arguments are mainly based on the linking and concentration compactness arguments. Finally, after the authors formulate the variational setting and present a required critical point theorem, they use the linking theorem and concentration compactness principle to prove the existence of ground state solutions of system (1.2).