Spectral Theory And Wave Processes

This volume contains a collection of original papers in mathematical physics, spectral theory and differential equations. The papers are dedicated to the outstanding mathematician, Professor M Sh Birman, on the occasion of his 70th birthday. Contributing authors are leading specialists and close professional coleagues of Birman. The main topics discussed are spectral and scattering theory of differential operators , trace formulas, and boundary value problems for PDEs. Several papers are devoted to the magnetic Schrodinger operator, which is within Birman's current scopeof interests and recently has been studied extensively. Included is a detailed survey of his mathematical work and an updated list of his publications. This book is aimed at graduate students and specialists in the above-mentioned branches of mathematics and theoretical physicists. The biographical section will be of interest to readers concerned with the scientific activities of Birman and the history of those branches of analysis and spectral theory where his contributions were important and often decisive.

The present volume contains the Proceedings of the International Conference on Spectral Theory and Mathematical Physics held in Santiago de Chile in November 2014. Main topics are: Ergodic Quantum Hamiltonians, Magnetic Schrödinger Operators, Quantum Field Theory, Quantum Integrable Systems, Scattering Theory, Semiclassical and Microlocal Analysis, Spectral Shift Function and Quantum Resonances. The book presents survey articles as well as original research papers on these topics. It will be of interest to researchers and graduate students in Mathematics and Mathematical Physics.

The normal business of physicists may be schematically thought of as predic ting the motions of particles on the basis of known forces, or the propagation of radiation on the basis of a known constitution of matter. The inverse problem is to conclude what the forces or constitutions are on the basis of the observed motion. A large part of our sensory contact with the world around us depends on an intuitive solution of such an inverse problem: We infer the shape, size, and surface texture of external objects from their scattering and absorption of light as detected by our eyes. When we use scattering experiments to learn the size or shape of particles, or the forces they exert upon each other, the nature of the problem is similar, if more refined. The kinematics, the equations of motion, are usually assumed to be known. It is the forces that are sought, and how they vary from point to point. As with so many other physical ideas, the first one we know of to have touched upon the kind of inverse problem discussed in this book was Lord Rayleigh (1877). In the course of describing the vibrations of strings of variable density he briefly discusses the possibility of inferring the density distribution from the frequencies of vibration. This passage may be regarded as a precursor of the mathematical study of the inverse spectral problem some seventy years later.

Spectral Theory of Guided Waves represents a distillation of the authors' (and others) efforts over several years to rigorously discuss many of the properties of guided waves. The bulk of the book deals with the properties of eigenwaves of regular waveguiding systems and relates these to a variety of physical situations and applications to illustrate their generality. The book also includes considerable discussion of the basic properties of normal waves with quadratic operator pencils. Unique in its coverage of these subjects, the book will be of interest to engineers, applied mathematicians, and physicists with a working knowledge of functional analysis and spectral theory.