Resumen de Relativistic Stability of Matter (I).

Rafael de la Llave Canosa , Charles L. Fefferman

• In this article, we study the quantum mechanics of N electrons and M nuclei interacting by Coulomb forces. Motivated by an important idea of Chandrasekhar and following Herbst [H], we modify the usual kinetic energy -? to take into account an effect from special relativity. As a result, the system can implode for unfavorable values of the nuclear charge Z and the fine structure constant a. This is analogous to the gravitational collapse of a heavy star. Our goal here is to find those values of a and Z for which the system is stable.