Spectral asymptotics via the semiclassical Birkhoff normal form

Abstract

This article gives a simple treatment of the quantum Birkhoff normal form for semiclassical pseudo-differential operators with smooth coefficients. The normal form is applied to describe the discrete spectrum in a generalised non-degenerate potential well, yielding uniform estimates in the energy $E$. This permits a detailed study of the spectrum in various asymptotic regions of the parameters (E,\h), and gives improvements and new proofs for many of the results in the field. In the completely resonant case we show that the pseudo-differential operator can be reduced to a Toeplitz operator on a reduced symplectic orbifold. Using this quantum reduction, new spectral asymptotics concerning the fine structure of eigenvalue clusters are proved. In the case of polynomial differential operators, a combinatorial trace formula is obtained.Comment: 44 pages, 2 figure