Confinement-deconfinement transitions for two-dimensional Dirac particles (Q2452483)

The authors consider a two-dimensional massless Dirac operator \(D_{A}\) coupled to a magnetic field \(B\) which is at least continuous on \(\mathbb{R} ^{2}\) and defined through \(D_{A}\varphi =\sigma \cdot (-i\nabla -A)\varphi \) where \(A=(A_{1},A_{2})\in C^{1}(\mathbb{R}^{2},\mathbb{R}^{2})\) satisfies \( \text{curl}A=B\) and \(\sigma =(\sigma _{1},\sigma _{2})\) with \(\sigma _{1}=\left( \begin{matrix} 0 & 1 \\ 1 & 0 \end{matrix} \right) \) and \(\sigma _{2}=\left( \begin{matrix} 0 & -i \\ i & 0 \end{matrix} \right) \).\ They also define the self-adjoint operator \(H\varphi =(D_{A}+V)\varphi \) where \(V\) is an electric potential which belongs to \( C^{1}(\mathbb{R}^{2},\mathbb{R})\) at least and grows at infinity. The main purpose of the paper is to prove regularity properties of the spectrum of the operator \(H\) together with its behaviour at infinity, in terms of the relation between \(B\) and \(V\) at infinity. In particular, the authors give a sharp condition for the discreteness of the spectrum of \(H\) beyond which they find dense pure point spectrum. Foir the proofs, the authors essentially use direct computations on the operators within this context.