Paper detail

On crystal ground state in the Schrödinger-Poisson model

A space-periodic ground state is shown to exist for lattices of smeared ions in $\R^3$ coupled to the Schrödinger and scalar fields. The elementary cell is necessarily neutral. The 1D, 2D and 3D lattices in $\R^3$ are considered, and a ground state is constructed by minimizing the energy per cell. The case of a 3D lattice is rather standard, because the elementary cell is compact, and the spectrum of the Laplacian is discrete. In the cases of 1D and 2D lattices, the energy functional is differentiable only on a dense set of variations, due to the presence of the continuous spectrum of the Laplacian that causes the infrared divergence of the Coulomb bond. Respectively, the construction of electrostatic potential and the derivation of the Schrödinger equation for the minimizer in these cases require an extra argument. The space-periodic ground states for 1D and 2D lattices give the model of the nanostructures similar to the carbon nanotubes and graphene respectively.