The stability of matter in magnetic fields

Abstract

The proof of the stability of matter is three decades old, but the question of stability when arbitrarily large magnetic fields are taken into account was settled only recently. Even more recent is the solution to the question of the stability of relativistic matter when the electron motion is governed by the Dirac operator (together with Dirac's prescription of filling the ``negative energy sea"). When magnetic fields are included the question arises whether it is better to fill the negative energy sea of the free Dirac operator or of the Dirac operator with magnetic field. The answer is found to be that the former prescription is unstable while the latter is stable. This paper is a brief, nontechnical summary of recent work with M. Loss, J.P. Solovej and H. Siedentop.