Liouville property, Wiener's test and unavoidable sets for Hunt processes

Let $(X,\mathcal W)$ be a balayage space, $1\in \mathcal W$, or - equivalently - let $\mathcal W$ be the set of excessive functions of a Hunt process on a locally compact space $X$ with countable base such that $\mathcal W$ separates points, every function in $\mathcal W$ is the supremum of its continuous minorants and there exist strictly positive continuous $u,v\in \mathcal W$ such that $u/v\to 0$ at infinity. We suppose that there is a Green function $G>0$ for $X$, a metric $\rho$ on $X$ and a decreasing function $g\colon[0,\infty)\to (0,\infty]$ having the doubling property such that $G\approx g\circ\rho$. Assuming that the constant function $1$ is harmonic and balls are relatively compact, is is shown that every positive harmonic function is constant (Liouville property) and that Wiener's test at infinity shows, if a given set $A$ in $X$ is unavoidable, that is, if the process hits $A$ with probability one, wherever it starts. An application yields that locally finite unions of pairwise disjoint balls $B(z,r_z)$, $z\in Z$, which have a certain separation property with respect to a suitable measure $\lambda$ on $X$ are unavoidable if and only if, for some/any point $x_0\in X$, the series $\sum_{z\in Z} g(\rho(x_0,z))/g(r_z)$ diverges. The results generalize and, exploiting a zero-one law for hitting probabilities, simplify recent work by S. Gardiner and M. Ghergu, A. Mimica and Z. Vondra\v cek, and the author

Computer Simulations of Quantum Chains

We report recent progress in computer simulations of quantum systems described in the path-integral formulation. For the example of the $\phi^4$ quantum chain we show that the accuracy of the simulation may greatly be enhanced by a combination of multigrid update techniques with a refined discretization scheme. This allows us to assess the accuracy of a variational approximation.Comment: 5 pages, LaTeX + 2 postscript figures. Talk presented by TS at "Path Integrals from meV to MeV: Dubna '96". See also http://www.cond-mat.physik.uni-mainz.de/~janke/doc/home_janke.htm