The massless Dirac equation in two dimensions: zero-energy obstructions and dispersive estimates

Abstract

We investigate $L^1\to L^{\infty }$ dispersive estimates for the massless two dimensional Dirac equation with a potential. In particular, we show that the Dirac evolution satisfies the natural $t^{-\frac{1}{2}}$ decay rate, which may be improved to $t^{-\frac{1}{2}-\gamma }$ for any $0\le \gamma <\frac{3}{2}$ at the cost of spatial weights. We classify the structure of threshold obstructions as being composed of a two dimensional space of p-wave resonances and a finite dimensional space of eigenfunctions at zero energy. We show that, in the presence of a threshold resonance, the Dirac evolution satisfies the natural decay rate except for a finite-rank piece. While in the case of a threshold eigenvalue only, the natural decay rate is preserved. In both cases we show that the decay rate may be improved at the cost of spatial weights.