Weak coupling for Schr\"odinger operators with complex potentials

Abstract

We study the discrete eigenvalues emerging from the threshold of the essential spectrum of one or two-dimensional Schr\"odinger operators with complex-valued $ L^p $-potentials in a weak coupling regime. We derive necessary and sufficient conditions on the potential for the existence or absence of discrete eigenvalues in this regime and also analyze their uniqueness and algebraic multiplicity. Our results can be viewed as natural non-self-adjoint extensions of the well-known classical weak coupling phenomenon for self-adjoint Schr\"odinger operators with real-valued potentials going back half a century to Simon's famous paper [Simon 1976].