Surface Phonons and Other Localized Excitations

The diatomic linear chain of masses coupled by harmonic springs is a textboook model for vibrational normal modes (phonons) in crystals. In addition to propagating acoustic and optic branches, this model is known to support a ``gap mode'' localized at the surface, provided the atom at the surface has light rather than heavy mass. An elementary argument is given which explains this mode and provides values for the frequency and localization length. By reinterpreting this mode in different ways, we obtain the frequency and localization lengths for three other interesting modes: (1) the surface vibrational mode of a light mass impurity at the surface of a monatomic chain; (2) the localized vibrational mode of a stacking fault in a diatomic chain; and (3) the localized vibrational mode of a light mass impurity in a monatomic chain.Comment: 5 pages with 4 embedded postscript figures. This paper will appear in the American Journal of Physic

Weak Chaos in a Quantum Kepler Problem

Transition from regular to chaotic dynamics in a crystal made of singular scatterers $U(r)=\lambda |r|^{-\sigma}$ can be reached by varying either sigma or lambda. We map the problem to a localization problem, and find that in all space dimensions the transition occurs at sigma=1, i.e., Coulomb potential has marginal singularity. We study the critical line sigma=1 by means of a renormalization group technique, and describe universality classes of this new transition. An RG equation is written in the basis of states localized in momentum space. The RG flow evolves the distribution of coupling parameters to a universal stationary distribution. Analytic properties of the RG equation are similar to that of Boltzmann kinetic equation: the RG dynamics has integrals of motion and obeys an H-theorem. The RG results for sigma=1 are used to derive scaling laws for transport and to calculate critical exponents.Comment: 28 pages, ReVTeX, 4 EPS figures, to appear in the I. M. Lifshitz memorial volume of Physics Report

Small Deviation Probability via Chaining

We obtain several extensions of Talagrand's lower bound for the small deviation probability using metric entropy. For Gaussian processes, our investigations are focused on processes with sub-polynomial and, respectively, exponential behaviour of covering numbers. The corresponding results are also proved for non-Gaussian symmetric stable processes, both for the cases of critically small and critically large entropy. The results extensively use the classical chaining technique; at the same time they are meant to explore the limits of this method.Comment: to appear in: Stochastic Processes and Their Application