arXiv subjects
Publications and source records attributed to Peter Kuchment.
The paper addresses the issue of existence and confinement of electromagnetic modes guided by linear defects in photonic crystals. Sufficient condition are provided for existence of such waves near a given spectral location. Confinement to the guide is achieved due to a photonic band gap in the bulk dielectric medium.
The paper is devoted to the range description of the Radon type transform that averages a function over all spheres centered on a given sphere. Such transforms arise naturally in thermoacoustic tomography, a novel method of medical imaging. Range descriptions have recently been obtained for such transforms, and consisted of smoothness and support conditions, moment conditions, and some additional orthogonality conditions of spectral nature. It has been noticed that in odd dimensions, surprisingly, the moment conditions are superfluous and can be eliminated. It is shown in this text that in fact the same happens in any dimension.
Several hybrid tomographic methods utilizing ultrasound modulation have been introduced lately. Success of these methods hinges on the feasibility of focusing ultrasound waves at an arbitrary point of interest. Such a focusing, however, is difficult to achieve in practice. We thus propose a way to avoid the use of focused waves through the so called synthetic focusing, i.e. by the reconstruction of the would-be response to the focused modulation from the measurements corresponding to realistic unfocused waves. Examples of reconstructions from simulated data are provided. This non-technical paper describes only the general concept, while technical details will appear elsewhere.
Let L be a Schroedinger operator with periodic magnetic and electric potentials, a Maxwell operator in a periodic medium, or an arbitrary self-adjoint elliptic linear partial differential operator in R^n with coefficients periodic with respect to a lattice G. Let also S be a finite part of its spectrum separated by gaps from the rest of the spectrum. We consider the old question of existence of a finite set of exponentially decaying Wannier functions such that their G-shifts span the whole spectral subspace corresponding to S in some "nice" manner. It is known that a topological obstruction might exist to finding exponentially decaying Wannier functions that form an orthonormal basis of the spectral subspace. This obstruction has the form of non-triviality of certain finite dimensional (with the dimension equal to the number of spectral bands in S) analytic vector bundle. We show that it is always possible to find a finite number of exponentially decaying composite Wannier functions such that their G-shifts form a 1-tight frame in the spectral subspace. This appears to be the best, one can do when the topological obstruction is present. The number of the functions is the smallest dimension of a trivial bundle containing an equivalent copy of the "obstacle bundle". In particular, it coincides with the number of spectral bands if and only if the bundle is trivial, in which case an orthonormal basis of exponentially decaying composite Wannier functions is known to exist. An estimate on this number is provided.
The purpose of this text is to set up a few basic notions concerning quantum graphs, to indicate some areas addressed in the quantum graph research, and to provide some pointers to the literature. The pointers in many cases are secondary, i.e. they refer to other surveys.
The paper presents a survey of mathematical problems, techniques, and challenges arising in the Thermoacoustic and Photoacoustic Tomography.
The paper contains a simple approach to reconstruction in Thermoacoustic and Photoacoustic Tomography. The technique works for any geometry of point detectors placement and for variable sound speed satisfying a non-trapping condition. A uniqueness of reconstruction result is also obtained.
An explicit derivation of dispersion relations and spectra for periodic Schrödinger operators on carbon nano-structures (including graphen and all types of single-wall nano-tubes) is provided.
The paper discusses relations between the structure of the complex Fermi surface below the spectrum of a second order periodic elliptic equation and integral representations of certain classes of its solutions. These integral representations are analogs of those previously obtained by S. Agmon, S. Helgason, and other authors for solutions of the Helmholtz equation (i.e., for generalized eigenfunctions of Laplace operator). In a previous joint work with Y. Pinchover we described all solutions that can be represented as integrals of positive Bloch solutions over the imaginary Fermi surface, with a hyperfunction as a ``measure''. Here we characterize the class of solutions such that the corresponding hyperfunction is a distribution on the Fermi surface.
The article is devoted to the following question. Consider a periodic self-adjoint difference (differential) operator on a graph (quantum graph) G with a co-compact free action of the integer lattice Z^n. It is known that a local perturbation of the operator might embed an eigenvalue into the continuous spectrum (a feature uncommon for periodic elliptic operators of second order). In all known constructions of such examples, the corresponding eigenfunction is compactly supported. One wonders whether this must always be the case. The paper answers this question affirmatively. What is more surprising, one can estimate that the eigenmode must be localized not far away from the perturbation (in a neighborhood of the perturbation's support, the width of the neighborhood determined by the unperturbed operator only). The validity of this result requires the condition of irreducibility of the Fermi (Floquet) surface of the periodic operator, which is expected to be satisfied for instance for periodic Schroedinger operators.
The transform considered in the paper integrates a function supported in the unit disk on the plane over all circles centered at the boundary of this disk. Such circular Radon transform arises in several contemporary imaging techniques, as well as in other applications. As it is common for transforms of Radon type, its range has infinite co-dimension in standard function spaces. Range descriptions for such transforms are known to be very important for computed tomography, for instance when dealing with incomplete data, error correction, and other issues. A complete range description for the circular Radon transform is obtained. Range conditions include the recently found set of moment type conditions, which happens to be incomplete, as well as the rest of conditions that have less standard form. In order to explain the procedure better, a similar (non-standard) treatment of the range conditions is described first for the usual Radon transform on the plane.
Penrose--Lifshits mushrooms are planar domains coming in nonisometric pairs with the same geodesic length spectrum. Recently S. Zelditch raised the question whether such billiards also have the same eigenvalue spectrum for the Dirichlet Laplacian (conjecturing ``no''). Here we show that generically (in the class of smooth domains) the two members of a mushroom pair have different spectra.
The paper describes relations between Liouville type theorems for solutions of a periodic elliptic equation (or a system) on an abelian cover of a compact Riemannian manifold and the structure of the dispersion relation for this equation at the edges of the spectrum. Here one says that the Liouville theorem holds if the space of solutions of any given polynomial growth is finite dimensional. The necessary and sufficient condition for a Liouville type theorem to hold is that the real Fermi surface of the elliptic operator consists of finitely many points (modulo the reciprocal lattice). Thus, such a theorem generically is expected to hold at the edges of the spectrum. The precise description of the spaces of polynomially growing solutions depends upon a `homogenized' constant coefficient operator determined by the analytic structure of the dispersion relation. In most cases, simple explicit formulas are found for the dimensions of the spaces of polynomially growing solutions in terms of the dispersion curves. The role of the base of the covering (in particular its dimension) is rather limited, while the deck group is of the most importance. The results are also established for overdetermined elliptic systems, which in particular leads to Liouville theorems for polynomially growing holomorphic functions on abelian coverings of compact analytic manifolds. Analogous theorems hold for abelian coverings of compact combinatorial or quantum graphs.
The circular Radon transform integrates a function over the set of all spheres with a given set of centers. The problem of injectivity of this transform (as well as inversion formulas, range descriptions, etc.) arises in many fields from approximation theory to integral geometry, to inverse problems for PDEs, and recently to newly developing types of tomography. The article discusses known and provides new results that one can obtain by methods that essentially involve only the finite speed of propagation and domain dependence for the wave equation.
The paper deals with some spectral properties of (mostly infinite) quantum and combinatorial graphs. Quantum graphs have been intensively studied lately due to their numerous applications to mesoscopic physics, nanotechnology, optics, and other areas. A Schnol type theorem is proven that allows one to detect that a point belongs to the spectrum when a generalized eigenfunction with an subexponential growth integral estimate is available. A theorem on spectral gap opening for ``decorated'' quantum graphs is established (its analog is known for the combinatorial case). It is also shown that if a periodic combinatorial or quantum graph has a point spectrum, it is generated by compactly supported eigenfunctions (``scars'').
The paper contains integral representations for certain classes of exponentially growing solutions of second order periodic elliptic equations. These representations are the analogs of those previously obtained by S. Agmon, S. Helgason, and other authors for solutions of the Helmholtz equation. When one restricts the class of solutions further, requiring their growth to be polynomial, one arrives to Liouville type theorems, which describe the structure and dimension of the spaces of such solutions. The Liouville type theorems previously proved by M. Avellaneda and F.-H. Lin, and J. Moser and M. Struwe for periodic second order elliptic equations in divergence form are significantly extended. Relations of these theorems with the analytic structure of the Fermi and Bloch surfaces are explained.
The problem of absence of eigenvalues imbedded into the continuous spectrum is considered for a Schrödinger operator with a periodic potential perturbed by a sufficiently fast decaying ``impurity'' potential. Results of this type have previously been known for the one-dimensional case only. Absence of embedded eigenvalues is shown in dimensions two and three if the corresponding Fermi surface is irreducible modulo natural symmetries. It is conjectured that all periodic potentials satisfy this condition. Separable periodic potentials satisfy it, and hence in dimensions two and three Schrödinger operator with a separable periodic potential perturbed by a sufficiently fast decaying ``impurity'' potential has no embedded eigenvalues.
The paper contains a brief description of a simplified version of A. Sobolev's proof of absolute continuity of spectra of periodic magnetic Schrödinger operators. This approach is applicable to all periodic elliptic operators known to be of interest for math physics (including Maxwell), and in all these cases leads to the same model problem of complex analysis. The full account of this approach will be provided elsewhere.