arXiv subjects
Publications and source records attributed to E. B. Saff.
For the unit sphere S^d in Euclidean space R^(d+1), we show that for d-1 1, discrete N-point minimal Riesz s-energy configurations are well separated in the sense that the minimal distance between any pair of distinct points in such a configuration is bounded below by C/N^(1/d), where C is a positive constant depending on s and d.
We provide a representation in terms of certain canonical functions for a sequence of polynomials orthogonal with respect to a weight that is strictly positive and analytic on the unit circle. These formulas yield a complete asymptotic expansion for these polynomials, valid uniformly in the whole complex plane. As a consequence, we obtain some results about the distribution of zeros of these polynomials. The main technique is the steepest descent analysis of Deift and Zhou, based on the matrix Riemann-Hilbert characterization proposed by Fokas, Its and Kitaev.
For a compact set A in Euclidean space we consider the asymptotic behavior of optimal (and near optimal) N-point configurations that minimize the Riesz s-energy (corresponding to the potential 1/t^s) over all N-point subsets of A, where s>0. For a large class of manifolds A having finite, positive d-dimensional Hausdorff measure, we show that such minimizing configurations have asymptotic limit distribution (as N tends to infinity with s fixed) equal to d-dimensional Hausdorff measure whenever s>d or s=d. In the latter case we obtain an explicit formula for the dominant term in the minimum energy. Our results are new even for the case of the d-dimensional sphere.