arXiv subjects
Publications and source records attributed to Peter Kuchment.
In this brief paper we present some results on creating and manipulating spectral gaps for a (regular) quantum graph by inserting appropriate internal structures into its vertices. Complete proofs and extensions of the results are planned for another publication.
This text is a somewhat reformatted (e.g., some statements that were not as such in the original paper, are given the names "Corollary" or "Theorem.") translation of the old and practically inaccessible paper: P. Kuchment, On the question of the affine-invariant points of convex bodies, (in Russian), Optimizacija No. 8(25) (1972), 48--51, 127. MR0350621. There partial solutions of some old problems of B. Grünbaum concerning affine-invariant points of convex bodies were obtained. The main restriction, due to which the solution was incomplete, was the compactness restriction on the group of linear transformations involved. It was noticed recently by O. Mordhorst (arXiv:1601.07850) that a simple additional argument allows one to restrict the consideration to the bodies whose John's ellipsoid is a ball and consequently to a compact group case. This in turn extends the result to the complete solution of B. Grünbaum's problem (see also some partial progress in the previous recent works by M. Meyer, C. Schütt, and E. Werner). The article translated below contains three main statements: existence of invariant points in the case when the linear parts of affine transformations are taken from a compact group, the resulting from this proof of B. Grünbaum's conjecture for the case of similarity invariant points, and an example precluding the set of all such points from being the convex hull of finitely many of them.
The article surveys the main techniques and results of the spectral theory of periodic operators arising in mathematical physics and other areas. Close attention is paid to studying analytic properties of Bloch and Fermi varieties, which influence significantly most properties of such operators. The approaches described are applicable not only to the standard model example of Schrödinger operator with periodic electric potential $-Δ+V(x)$, but to a wide variety of elliptic periodic equations and systems, equations on graphs, $\overline{\partial}$-operator, and other operators on abelian coverings of compact bases. Many important applications are mentioned. However, due to the size restrictions, they are not dealt with in details.
Precise asymptotics known for the Green function of the Laplacian have found their analogs for bounded below periodic elliptic operators of the second-order below and at the bottom of the spectrum. Due to the band-gap structure of the spectra of such operators, the question arises whether similar results can be obtained near or at the edges of spectral gaps. In a previous work, two of the authors considered the case of a spectral edge. The main result of this article is finding such asymptotics near a gap edge, for "generic" periodic elliptic operators of second-order with real coefficients in dimension $d \geq 2$, when the gap edge occurs at a symmetry point of the Brillouin zone.
In the previous paper "Stabilizing Inverse Problems by Internal Data", the authors introduced a simple procedure that allows one to detect whether and explain why internal information arising in several novel coupled physics (hybrid) imaging modalities could turn extremely unstable techniques, such as optical tomography or electrical impedance tomography, into stable, good-resolution procedures. It was shown that in all cases of interest, the Frechet derivative of the forward mapping is a pseudo-differential operator with an explicitly computable principal symbol. If one can set up the imaging procedure in such a way that the symbol is elliptic, this would indicate that the problem was stabilized. In the cases when the symbol is not elliptic, the technique suggests how to change the procedure (e.g., by adding extra measurements) to achieve ellipticity. In this article, we consider the situation arising in acousto-optical tomography (also called ultrasound modulated optical tomography), where the internal data available involves the Green's function, and thus depends globally on the unknown parameter(s) of the equation and its solution. It is shown that the technique of "Stabilizing Inverse Problems by Internal Data" can be successfully adopted to this situation as well. We also obtain results on generic uniqueness for the linearized problem in a variety of situations, including those arising in acousto-electric and quantitative photoacoustic tomography.
We study the dispersion relations and spectra of invariant Schrödinger operators on a graphyne structure (lithographite). In particular, description of different parts of the spectrum, band-gap structure, and Dirac points are provided.
The paper addresses the the number of nodal domains for eigenfunctions of Schrödinger operators with Dirichlet boundary conditions in bounded domains. In dimension one, the $n$th eigenfunction has $n$ nodal domains. The Courant Theorem claims that in any dimension, the number of nodal domains of the $n$th eigenfunction cannot exceed $n$. However, in dimensions higher than 1 the equality can hold for only finitely many eigenfunctions. Thus, a "nodal deficiency" arises. Examples are known of eigenfunctions with arbitrarily large index $n$ that have just two nodal domains. It was suggested in the recent years to look at the partitions of the domain, rather than eigenfunctions. It was shown in a recent paper by Helffer, Hoffmann-Ostenhof and Terracini that (under some natural conditions) bipartite partitions minimizing the maximum of the ground-state energies in sub-domains of the partition, correspond to the "Courant sharp" eigenfunctions, i.e. to those with zero nodal deficiency. In this paper, the authors show, under some genericity conditions, among the bipartite equipartitions, the nodal ones correspond exactly to the critical points of an analogous functional, with the nodal deficiency being equal to the Morse index at this point. This explains, in particular, why all the minimal partitions must be Courant sharp.
Several newly developing hybrid imaging methods (e.g., those combining electrical impedance or optical imaging with acoustics) enable one to obtain some auxiliary interior information (usually some combination of the electrical conductivity and the current) about the parameters of the tissues. This information, in turn, happens to stabilize the exponentially unstable and thus low resolution optical and electrical impedance tomography. Various known instances of this effect have been studied individually. We show that there is a simple general technique (covering all known cases) that shows what kind of interior data stabilizes the reconstruction, and why. Namely, we show when the linearized problem becomes elliptic pseudo-differential one, and thus stable. Stability here is meant as the problem being Fredholm, so the local uniqueness is not shown and probably does not hold in such generality.
The article describes interesting nonlinear differential identities satisfied by standard exponential and trigonometric functions, which appeared as byproducts of medical imaging research. They look like some kind of non-commutative binomial formulas. A brief description of the origin of these identities is provided, as well as their direct algebraic derivation. Relations with separate analyticity theorems in several complex variables and some open problems are also mentioned.
Precise asymptotics known for the Green's function of the Laplace operator have found their analogs for periodic elliptic operators of the second order at and below the bottom of the spectrum. Due to the band-gap structure of the spectra of such operators, the question arises whether similar results can be obtained near or at the edges of spectral gaps. As the result of this work shows, this is possible at a spectral edge in dimensions d>2.
The article addresses the problem of detecting presence and location of a small low emission source inside of an object, when the background noise dominates. This problem arises, for instance, in some homeland security applications. The goal is to reach the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) levels on the order of $10^{-3}$. A Bayesian approach to this problem is implemented in 2D. The method allows inference not only about the existence of the source, but also about its location. We derive Bayes factors for model selection and estimation of location based on Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) simulation. A simulation study shows that with sufficiently high total emission level, our method can effectively locate the source.
The article addresses the possibility of robust detection of geometrically small, low emission sources on a significantly stronger background. This problem is important for homeland security. A technique of detecting such sources using Compton type cameras is developed, which is shown on numerical examples to have high sensitivity and specificity and also allows to assign confidence probabilities of the detection. 2D case is considered in detail.
The article provides a brief survey of the mathematics of some of the newly being developed so called "hybrid" (also called "multi-physics" or "multi-wave") imaging techniques.
We propose and test stable algorithms for the reconstruction of the internal conductivity of a biological object using acousto-electric measurements. Namely, the conventional impedance tomography scheme is supplemented by scanning the object with acoustic waves that slightly perturb the conductivity and cause the change in the electric potential measured on the boundary of the object. These perturbations of the potential are then used as the data for the reconstruction of the conductivity. The present method does not rely on "perfectly focused" acoustic beams. Instead, more realistic propagating spherical fronts are utilized, and then the measurements that would correspond to perfect focusing are synthesized. In other words, we use \emph{synthetic focusing}. Numerical experiments with simulated data show that our techniques produce high quality images, both in 2D and 3D, and that they remain accurate in the presence of high-level noise in the data. Local uniqueness and stability for the problem also hold.
We study the dependence of the quantum graph Hamiltonian, its resolvent, and its spectrum on the vertex conditions and graph edge lengths. In particular, several results on the interlacing (bracketing) of the spectra of graphs with different vertex conditions are obtained and their applications are discussed.
Let f(x) belong to L^p(R^n) and R>0. The transform is considered that integrates the function f over (almost) all spheres of radius R in R^n. This operator is known to be non-injective (as one can see by taking Fourier transform). However, the counterexamples that can be easily constructed using Bessel functions of the 1st kind, only belong to L^p if p>2n/(n-1). It has been shown previously by S. Thangavelu that for p not exceeding the critical number 2n/(n-1), the transform is indeed injective. In this article, the support theorem is proven that strengthens this injectivity result. Namely, if K is a convex bounded domain in R^n, the index p is not above 2n/(n-1), and (almost) all the integrals of $f$ over spheres of radius $R$ not intersecting K are equal to zero, then f is supported in the closure of the domain K. In fact, convexity in this case is too strong a condition, and the result holds for any what we call an R-convex domain.
Periodic $2$nd order ordinary differential operators on $\R$ are known to have the edges of their spectra to occur only at the spectra of periodic and antiperiodic boundary value problems. The multi-dimensional analog of this property is false, as was shown in a 2007 paper by some of the authors of this article. However, one sometimes encounters the claims that in the case of a single periodicity (i.e., with respect to the lattice $\mathbb{Z}$), the $1D$ property still holds, and spectral edges occur at the periodic and anti-periodic spectra only. In this work we show that even in the simplest case of quantum graphs this is not true. It is shown that this is true if the graph consists of a $1D$ chain of finite graphs connected by single edges, while if the connections are formed by at least two edges, the spectral edges can already occur away from the periodic and anti-periodic spectra.
This is the manuscript of the chapter for a planned Handbook of Mathematical Methods in Imaging that surveys the mathematical models, problems, and algorithms of the Thermoacoustic (TAT) and Photoacoustic (PAT) Tomography. TAT and PAT represent probably the most developed of the several novel ``hybrid'' methods of medical imaging. These new modalities combine different physical types of waves (electromagnetic and acoustic in case of TAT and PAT) in such a way that the resolution and contrast of the resulting method are much higher than those achievable using only acoustic or electromagnetic measurements.