We study massless Dirac fermions in a supercritical Coulomb potential with the emphasis on that its low-energy physics is universal and parametrized by a single quantity per supercritical angular momentum channel. This low-energy parameter with the dimension of length is defined only up to multiplicative factors and thus each supercritical channel exhibits the discrete scale invariance. In particular, we show that the induced vacuum polarization has a power-law tail whose coefficient is a sum of log-periodic functions with respect to the distance from the potential center. This coefficient can also be expressed in terms of the energy and width of so-called atomic collapse resonances. Our universal predictions on the vacuum polarization and its relationship to atomic collapse resonances shed light on the longstanding fundamental problem of quantum electrodynamics and can in principle be tested by graphene experiments with charged impurities.

• Received 24 May 2014
• Revised 2 September 2014

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevB.90.165414