A variational approach to the Brown-Ravenhall operator for the relativistic one-electron atoms

Eigenvalue gaps for the Cauchy process and a Poincaré inequality

A connection between the semigroup of the Cauchy process killed upon exiting a domain $D$ and a mixed boundary value problem for the Laplacian in one dimension higher known as the "mixed Steklov problem," was established in a previous paper of the authors. From this, a variational characterization for the eigenvalues $λ_n$, $n\geq 1$, of the Cauchy process in $D$ was obtained. In this paper we obtain a variational characterization of the difference between $λ_n$ and $λ_1$. We study bounded convex domains which are symmetric with respect to one of the coordinate axis and obtain lower bound esti…