Antibinding of atomic electrons in strong inhomogeneous magnetic fields

Abstract

The ground-state energy of heavy one-electron ions in an inhomogeneous locally bounded magnetic field is estimated by the variational principle. The ions are described by means of the pseudorelativistic Herbst-Chandrasekhar operator. Two classes of magnetic fields are considered which model a field-free region around the central charge. It is shown that for a certain size of this region the ground-state energy becomes positive and increases strongly with the magnetic field strength. This behavior is in contrast to the two-dimensional case where electrons can be bound by such a field-free region.