Induced vacuum charge of massless fermions in Coulomb and Aharonov–Bohm potentials in 2+1 dimensions

Аннотация

We study the vacuum polarization of zero-mass charged fermions in Coulomb and Aharonov–Bohm potentials in 2+1 dimensions. For this, we construct the Green’s function of the two-dimensional Dirac equation in the considered field configuration and use it to find the density of the induced vacuum charge in so-called subcritical and supercritical regions. The Green’s function is represented in regular and singular (in the source) solutions of the Dirac radial equation for a charged fermion in Coulomb and Aharonov–Bohm potentials in 2+1 dimensions and satisfies self-adjoint boundary conditions at the source. In the supercritical region, the Green’s function has a discontinuity related to the presence of singularities on the nonphysical sheet of the complex plane of “energy,” which are caused by the appearance of an infinite number of quasistationary states with negative energies. Ultimately, this situation represents the neutral vacuum instability. On the boundary of the supercritical region, the induced vacuum charge is independent of the self-adjoint extension. We hope that the obtained results will contribute to a better understanding of important problems in quantum electrodynamics and will also be applicable to the problem of screening the Coulomb impurity due to vacuum polarization in graphene with the effects associated with taking the electron spin into account.