Tunnel effect for semiclassical random walk

We study a semiclassical random walk with respect to a probability measure with a finite number n_0 of wells. We show that the associated operator has exactly n_0 exponentially close to 1 eigenvalues (in the semiclassical sense), and that the other are O(h) away from 1. We also give an asymptotic of these small eigenvalues. The key ingredient in our approach is a general factorization result of pseudodifferential operators, which allows us to use recent results on the Witten Laplacian

Spectral projections and resolvent bounds for partially elliptic quadratic differential operators

We study resolvents and spectral projections for quadratic differential operators under an assumption of partial ellipticity. We establish exponential-type resolvent bounds for these operators, including Kramers-Fokker-Planck operators with quadratic potentials. For the norms of spectral projections for these operators, we obtain complete asymptotic expansions in dimension one, and for arbitrary dimension, we obtain exponential upper bounds and the rate of exponential growth in a generic situation. We furthermore obtain a complete characterization of those operators with orthogonal spectral projections onto the ground state.Comment: 60 pages, 3 figures. J. Pseudo-Differ. Oper. Appl., to appear. Revised according to referee report, including minor changes to Corollary 1.8. The final publication will be available at link.springer.co

Celebrating Cercignani's conjecture for the Boltzmann equation

Cercignani's conjecture assumes a linear inequality between the entropy and entropy production functionals for Boltzmann's nonlinear integral operator in rarefied gas dynamics. Related to the field of logarithmic Sobolev inequalities and spectral gap inequalities, this issue has been at the core of the renewal of the mathematical theory of convergence to thermodynamical equilibrium for rarefied gases over the past decade. In this review paper, we survey the various positive and negative results which were obtained since the conjecture was proposed in the 1980s.Comment: This paper is dedicated to the memory of the late Carlo Cercignani, powerful mind and great scientist, one of the founders of the modern theory of the Boltzmann equation. 24 pages. V2: correction of some typos and one ref. adde

Contents

This paper is devoted to the semiclassical magnetic Laplacian. Until now WKB expansions for the eigenfunctions were only established in presence of a non-zero electric potential. Here we tackle the pure magnetic case. Thanks to Feynman-Hellmann type formulas and coherent states decomposition, we develop here a magnetic Born-Oppenheimer theory. Exploiting the multiple scales of the problem, we are led to solve an effective eikonal equation in pure magnetic cases and to obtain WKB expansions. We also investigate explicit examples for which we can improve our general theorem: global WKB expansions, quasi-optimal estimates of Agmon and upper bound of the tunelling effect (in symmetric cases). We also apply our strategy to get more accurate descriptions of the eigenfunctions in a wide range of situations analyzed in the last two decades