Some essentially self-adjoint Dirac operators with spherically symmetric potentials

It is shown that the one electron Dirac operator in a stationary electric field is essentially self-adjoint, on the domain of infinitely differentiable functions of compact support, for a class of spherically symmetric potentials including the Coulomb potential, for atomic numbers less than or equal to 118. In addition, the domain of the closure of the perturbed operator is the same as the domain of the closure of the unperturbed operator. We also give an abstract theorem on domain-preserving essential self-adjointness for perturbed operators, which is perhaps of independent interest.