Fermion pair production in planar Coulomb and Aharonov--Bohm potentials

Exact analytic solutions are found for the Dirac equation in 2+1 dimensions for a spin-one-half particle in a combination of the Lorentz 3-vector and scalar Coulomb as well as Aharonov–Bohm potentials. We employ the two-component Dirac equation which contains a new parameter introduced by Hagen to describe the spin of the spin-1/2 particle. We derive a transcendental equations that implicitly determine the energy spectrum of an electron near the negative-energy continuum boundary and the critical charges for some electron states. Fermion pair production from a vacuum by a strong Coulomb field in the presence of the magnetic flux tube of zero radius is considered. It is shown that the presence of the Ahanorov–Bohm flux tends to stabilize the system.