Quantum Mechanical Hamiltonians with Large Ground-State Degeneracy

Abstract

Nonrelativistic Hamiltonians with large, even infinite, ground-state degeneracy are studied by connecting the degeneracy to the property of a Dirac operator. We then identify a special class of Hamiltonians, for which the full space of degenerate ground states in any spatial dimension can be exhibited explicitly. The two-dimensional version of the latter coincides with the Pauli Hamiltonian, and recently-discussed models leading to higher-dimensional Landau levels are obtained as special cases of the higher-dimensional version of this Hamiltonian. But, in our framework, it is only the asymptotic behavior of the background `potential' that matters for the ground-state degeneracy. We work out in detail the ground states of the three-dimensional model in the presence of a uniform magnetic field and such potential. In the latter case one can see degenerate stacking of all 2d Landau levels along the magnetic field axis.