Counting eigenvalues below the lowest Landau level

Abstract

For the magnetic Laplacian on a bounded planar domain, imposing Neumann boundary conditions produces eigenvalues below the lowest Landau level. If the domain has two boundary components and one imposes a Neumann condition on one component and a Dirichlet condition on the other, one gets fewer such eigenvalues than when imposing Neumann boundary conditions on the two components. We quantify this observation for two models: the strip and the annulus. In both models one can separate variables and deal with a family of fiber operators, thereby reducing the problem to counting band functions, the eigenvalues of the fiber operators.