Self-adjoint realisations of the Dirac-Coulomb Hamiltonian for heavy nuclei

Abstract

We derive a classification of the self-adjoint extensions of the three-dimensional Dirac-Coulomb operator in the critical regime of the Coulomb coupling. Our approach is solely based upon the KreĬn-Višik- Birman extension scheme, or also on Grubb's universal classification theory, as opposite to previous works within the standard von Neu- mann framework. This let the boundary condition of self-adjointness emerge, neatly and intrinsically, as a multiplicative constraint between regular and singular part of the functions in the domain of the exten- sion, the multiplicative constant giving also immediate information on the invertibility property and on the resolvent and spectral gap of the extension.