High-energy eigenfunctions of point-perturbations of the Laplacian

Abstract

In this paper, we explore the high-frequency properties of eigenfunctions of point perturbations of the Laplacian on a compact Riemannian manifold. These systems cannot be obtained as the quantization of a classical Hamiltonian, as the effect of the perturbation amounts to prescribing certain boundary conditions on a discrete set of points. We are interested in understanding to what extent the high-frequency behavior of eigenfunctions is governed by the global dynamics of the geodesic flow in the manifold (the classical flow corresponding to the unperturbed Laplacian). We prove that as soon as the Laplacian is perturbed by a finite set of point scatterers satisfying a \emph{non-focality} condition, namely, that the family of geodesics starting from this set and coming back to it has zero measure, semiclassical measures corresponding to high-frequency sequences of eigenfunctions are invariant under the geodesic flow. Invariance may fail when the non-focality condition does not hold, as is shown in a companion article [arXiv:2601.19701]. Our results are based on a quasimode construction that requires improved estimates on the spectral function of the Laplacian on the set of scatterers.