Vacuum polarization of planar charged fermions with Coulomb and Aharonov–Bohm potentials

Abstract

Vacuum polarization of charged massless fermions is investigated in the superposition of Coulomb and Aharonov–Bohm (AB) potentials in 2 + 1 dimensions. For this purpose, we construct the Green function of the two-dimensional Dirac equation with Coulomb and AB potentials (via the regular and irregular solutions of the radial Dirac equation) and then calculate the vacuum polarization charge density in the so-called subcritical and supercritical regimes. In the supercritical regime, the Green function has a discontinuity in the complex plane of “energy” due to the singularities on the negative energy axis; these singularities are situated on the unphysical sheet and related to the creation of infinitely many quasistationary fermionic states with negative energies. We expect that our results will be helpful in gaining deeper understanding of the fundamental problem of quantum electrodynamics which can be applied to the problems of charged impurity screening in graphene taking into consideration the electron spin.