Revisiting the Weak Coupling Phenomenon for Two-Dimensional Schrödinger Operators

We study the existence of negative eigenvalues for two-dimensional Schrödinger operators with real-valued potentials in the weak coupling regime. In his pioneering paper [Simon 1976] from half a century ago, Simon was the first to describe the unique negative eigenvalue emerging from the threshold of the essential spectrum of one- and two-dimensional Schrödinger operators. The aim of this paper is to extend Simon’s results in two dimensions to a broader class of potentials, allowing for both stronger singularities and slower decay at infinity, at the cost of losing uniqueness of weakly coupled eigenvalues.