140 research outputs found
Finite speed of propagation and local boundary conditions for wave equations with point interactions
We show that the boundary conditions entering in the definition of the
self-adjoint operator describing the Laplacian plus a finite number of point
interactions are local if and only if the corresponding wave equation has
finite speed of propagatio
Local approximation of observables and commutator bounds
We discuss conditional expectations that can be used as generalizations of
the partial trace for quantum systems with an infinite-dimensional Hilbert
space of states
On the Spectral Gap of a Quantum Graph
We consider the problem of finding universal bounds of "isoperimetric" or
"isodiametric" type on the spectral gap of the Laplacian on a metric graph with
natural boundary conditions at the vertices, in terms of various analytical and
combinatorial properties of the graph: its total length, diameter, number of
vertices and number of edges. We investigate which combinations of parameters
are necessary to obtain non-trivial upper and lower bounds and obtain a number
of sharp estimates in terms of these parameters. We also show that, in contrast
to the Laplacian matrix on a combinatorial graph, no bound depending only on
the diameter is possible. As a special case of our results on metric graphs, we
deduce estimates for the normalised Laplacian matrix on combinatorial graphs
which, surprisingly, are sometimes sharper than the ones obtained by purely
combinatorial methods in the graph theoretical literature
A theory of spectral partitions of metric graphs
We introduce an abstract framework for the study of clustering in metric
graphs: after suitably metrising the space of graph partitions, we restrict
Laplacians to the clusters thus arising and use their spectral gaps to define
several notions of partition energies; this is the graph counterpart of the
well-known theory of spectral minimal partitions on planar domains and includes
the setting in [Band \textit{et al}, Comm.\ Math.\ Phys.\ \textbf{311} (2012),
815--838] as a special case. We focus on the existence of optimisers for a
large class of functionals defined on such partitions, but also study their
qualitative properties, including stability, regularity, and parameter
dependence. We also discuss in detail their interplay with the theory of nodal
partitions. Unlike in the case of domains, the one-dimensional setting of
metric graphs allows for explicit computation and analytic -- rather than
numerical -- results. Not only do we recover the main assertions in the theory
of spectral minimal partitions on domains, as studied in [Conti \textit{et al},
Calc.\ Var.\ \textbf{22} (2005), 45--72; Helffer \textit{et al}, Ann.\ Inst.\
Henri Poincar\'e Anal.\ Non Lin\'eaire \textbf{26} (2009), 101--138], but we
can also generalise some of them and answer (the graph counterparts of) a few
open questions
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