A variational principle for block operator matrices and its application to the angular part of the Dirac operator in curved spacetime (Q949631)

The Kerr-Newman metric describes the space-time in the exterior of an electrically charged rotating massive black hole. A spin-\(1/2\) charged particle with mass \(m\), situated outside of the black hole, obeys the Dirac equation. With a suitable ansatz, one decouples it into a system of two ordinary differential equations: the radial and the angular equations. The solution of the latter are the eigenfunctions of an operator \(A\) acting on \(L^2\big((0,\pi);\mathbb{C}^2\big)\). Its diagonal elements are given by \(\pm am\cos(v)\) and its off-diagonal ones by \[ B_\pm:= \pm\frac{d}{dv} +\frac{k+1/2}{\sin(v)} + a \omega\sin(v). \] Here, \(k\in \mathbb{Z}\) is linked with the motion of the particle in the plane of symmetry and \(a\) with the rotation of the black hole. The spectrum of \(A\) is solely constituted of eigenvalues. Their accumulation points are \(\{\pm\infty\}\). As the operator is unbounded from below, one cannot use directly a min-max principle to obtain some bounds on the eigenvalues. To overcome the problem, the author works with some Sturm-Liouville operators and with the Schur complement method (also called the Feshbach method). These analytic bounds are compared with numerical values.