Nodal domains of Maass forms I

This paper deals with some questions that have received a lot of attention since they were raised by Hejhal and Rackner in their 1992 numerical computations of Maass forms. We establish sharp upper and lower bounds for the $L^2$-restrictions of these forms to certain curves on the modular surface. These results, together with the Lindelof Hypothesis and known subconvex $L^\infty$-bounds are applied to prove that locally the number of nodal domains of such a form goes to infinity with its eigenvalue.Comment: To appear in GAF

Semiclassical low energy scattering for one-dimensional Schr\"odinger operators with exponentially decaying potentials

We consider semiclassical Schr\"odinger operators on the real line of the form $$H(\hbar)=-\hbar^2 \frac{d^2}{dx^2}+V(\cdot;\hbar)$$ with $\hbar>0$ small. The potential $V$ is assumed to be smooth, positive and exponentially decaying towards infinity. We establish semiclassical global representations of Jost solutions $f_\pm(\cdot,E;\hbar)$ with error terms that are uniformly controlled for small $E$ and $\hbar$, and construct the scattering matrix as well as the semiclassical spectral measure associated to $H(\hbar)$. This is crucial in order to obtain decay bounds for the corresponding wave and Schr\"odinger flows. As an application we consider the wave equation on a Schwarzschild background for large angular momenta $\ell$ where the role of the small parameter $\hbar$ is played by $\ell^{-1}$. It follows from the results in this paper and \cite{DSS2}, that the decay bounds obtained in \cite{DSS1}, \cite{DS} for individual angular momenta $\ell$ can be summed to yield the sharp $t^{-3}$ decay for data without symmetry assumptions.Comment: 44 pages, minor modifications in order to match the published version, will appear in Annales Henri Poincar

Asymptotics of the eigenvalues of the rotating harmonic oscillator

AbstractThe eigenenergies λ of a radial Schrödinger equation associated with the problem of a rotating harmonic oscillator are studied, these being values which admit eigensolutions which vanish at both the origin (a regular singularity of the equation) and at infinity. Asymptotic expansions, for the case where a coupling parameter α is small, are derived for λ. The approximation for λ consists of two components, an asymptotic expansion in powers of α, and a single term which is exponentially small (which can be associated with tunneling effects). The method of proof is rigorous, and utilizes three separate asymptotic approximations for the eigenfunction in the complex radial plane, involving elementary functions (WKB or Liouville-Green approximations), a modified Bessel function and a parabolic cylinder function

Computation of parabolic cylinder functions having complex argument

Numerical methods for the computation of the parabolic cylinder function U(a,z) for real a and complex z are presented. The main tools are recent asymptotic expansions involving exponential and Airy functions, with slowly varying analytic coefficient functions involving simple coefficients, and stable integral representations; these two main methods can be complemented with Maclaurin series and a Poincaré asymptotic expansion. We provide numerical evidence showing that the combination of these methods is enough for computing the function with 5 × 10-13 relative accuracy in double precision floating point arithmetic.The authors acknowledge financial support from Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación, projects PGC2018-098279-B-I00 (MCIN/AEI/10.13039/ 501100011033/FEDER “Una manera de hacer Europa”) and PID2021-127252NB-I00 (MCIN/AEI/10.13039/ 501100011033/FEDER, UE)