arXiv subjects
Publications and source records attributed to S. A. Fulling.
We offer a clarification of the significance of the indicated paper of H. Cheng. Cheng's conclusions about the attractive nature of Casimir forces between parallel plates are valid beyond the particular model in which he derived them; they are likely to be relevant to other recent literature on the effects of hidden dimensions on Casimir forces.
In geometric analysis, an index theorem relates the difference of the numbers of solutions of two differential equations to the topological structure of the manifold or bundle concerned, sometimes using the heat kernels of two higher-order differential operators as an intermediary. In this paper, the case of quantum graphs is addressed. A quantum graph is a graph considered as a (singular) one-dimensional variety and equipped with a second-order differential Hamiltonian H (a "Laplacian") with suitable conditions at vertices. For the case of scale-invariant vertex conditions (i.e., conditions that do not mix the values of functions and of their derivatives), the constant term of the heat-kernel expansion is shown to be proportional to the trace of the internal scattering matrix of the graph. This observation is placed into the index-theory context by factoring the Laplacian into two first-order operators, H =A*A, and relating the constant term to the index of A. An independent consideration provides an index formula for any differential operator on a finite quantum graph in terms of the vertex conditions. It is found also that the algebraic multiplicity of 0 as a root of the secular determinant of H is the sum of the nullities of A and A*.
Casimir pistons are models in which finite Casimir forces can be calculated without any suspect renormalizations. It has been suggested that such forces are always attractive. We present three scenarios in which that is not true. Two of these depend on mixing two types of boundary conditions. The other, however, is a simple type of quantum graph in which the sign of the force depends upon the number of edges.
The regularized vacuum energy (or energy density) of a quantum field subjected to static external conditions is shown to satisfy a certain partial differential equation with respect to two variables, the mass and the "time" (ultraviolet cutoff parameter). The equation is solved to provide integral expressions for the regularized energy (more precisely, the cylinder kernel) at positive mass in terms of that for zero mass. Alternatively, for fixed positive mass all coefficients in the short-time asymptotics of the regularized energy can be obtained recursively from the first nontrivial coefficient, which is the renormalized vacuum energy.
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.
A simple transformation converts a solution of a partial differential equation with a Dirichlet boundary condition to a function satisfying a Robin (generalized Neumann) condition. In the simplest cases this observation enables the exact construction of the Green functions for the wave, heat, and Schrodinger problems with a Robin boundary condition. The resulting physical picture is that the field can exchange energy with the boundary, and a delayed reflection from the boundary results. In more general situations the method allows at least approximate and local construction of the appropriate reflected solutions, and hence a "classical path" analysis of the Green functions and the associated spectral information. By this method we solve the wave equation on an interval with one Robin and one Dirichlet endpoint, and thence derive several variants of a Gutzwiller-type expansion for the density of eigenvalues. The variants are consistent except for an interesting subtlety of distributional convergence that affects only the neighborhood of zero in the frequency variable.
Casimir energy is a nonlocal effect; its magnitude cannot be deduced from heat kernel expansions, even those including the integrated boundary terms. On the other hand, it is known that the divergent terms in the regularized (but not yet renormalized) total vacuum energy are associated with the heat kernel coefficients. Here a recent study of the relations among the eigenvalue density, the heat kernel, and the integral kernel of the operator $e^{-t\sqrt{H}}$ is exploited to characterize this association completely. Various previously isolated observations about the structure of the regularized energy emerge naturally. For over 20 years controversies have persisted stemming from the fact that certain (presumably physically meaningful) terms in the renormalized vacuum energy density in the interior of a cavity become singular at the boundary and correlate to certain divergent terms in the regularized total energy. The point of view of the present paper promises to help resolve these issues.
The structure of the thermal equilibrium state of a weakly interacting Bose gas is of current interest. We calculate the density matrix of that state in two ways. The most effective method, in terms of yielding a simple, explicit answer, is to construct a generating function within the traditional framework of quantum statistical mechanics. The alternative method, arguably more interesting, is to construct the thermal state as a vector state in an artificial system with twice as many degrees of freedom. It is well known that this construction has an actual physical realization in the quantum thermodynamics of black holes, where the added degrees of freedom correspond to the second sheet of the Kruskal manifold and the thermal vector state is a state of the Unruh or the Hartle-Hawking type. What is unusual about the present work is that the Bogolubov transformation used to construct the thermal state combines in a rather symmetrical way with Bogolubov's original transformation of the same form, used to implement the interaction of the nonideal gas in linear approximation. In addition to providing a density matrix, the method makes it possible to calculate efficiently certain expectation values directly in terms of the thermal vector state of the doubled system.
The eigenvalue density of a quantum-mechanical system exhibits oscillations, determined by the closed orbits of the corresponding classical system; this relationship is simple and strong for waves in billiards or on manifolds, but becomes slightly muddy for a Schrodinger equation with a potential, where the orbits depend on the energy. We discuss several variants of a way to restore the simplicity by rescaling the coupling constant or the size of the orbit or both. In each case the relation between the oscillation frequency and the period of the orbit is inspected critically; in many cases it is observed that a characteristic length of the orbit is a better indicator. When these matters are properly understood, the periodic-orbit theory for generic quantum systems recovers the clarity and simplicity that it always had for the wave equation in a cavity. Finally, we comment on the alleged "paradox" that semiclassical periodic-orbit theory is more effective in calculating low energy levels than high ones.
L. K. Grover's search algorithm in quantum computing gives an optimal, square-root speedup in the search for a single object in a large unsorted database. In this paper, we expound Grover's algorithm in a Hilbert-space framework that isolates its geometrical essence, and we generalize it to the case where more than one object satisfies the search criterion.
Residue arithmetic is an elegant and convenient way of computing with integers that exceed the natural word size of a computer. The algorithms are highly parallel and hence naturally adapted to quantum computation. The process differs from most quantum algorithms currently under discussion in that the output would presumably be obtained by classical superposition of the output of many identical quantum systems, instead of by arranging for constructive interference in the wave function of a single quantum computer.
Asymptotic expansions of Green functions and spectral densities associated with partial differential operators are widely applied in quantum field theory and elsewhere. The mathematical properties of these expansions can be clarified and more precisely determined by means of tools from distribution theory and summability theory. (These are the same, insofar as recently the classic Cesaro-Riesz theory of summability of series and integrals has been given a distributional interpretation.) When applied to the spectral analysis of Green functions (which are then to be expanded as series in a parameter, usually the time), these methods show: (1) The "local" or "global" dependence of the expansion coefficients on the background geometry, etc., is determined by the regularity of the asymptotic expansion of the integrand at the origin (in "frequency space"); this marks the difference between a heat kernel and a Wightman two-point function, for instance. (2) The behavior of the integrand at infinity determines whether the expansion of the Green function is genuinely asymptotic in the literal, pointwise sense, or is merely valid in a distributional (cesaro-averaged) sense; this is the difference between the heat kernel and the Schrodinger kernel. (3) The high-frequency expansion of the spectral density itself is local in a distributional sense (but not pointwise). These observations make rigorous sense out of calculations in the physics literature that are sometimes dismissed as merely formal.
It is well known that short-time expansions of heat kernels correlate to formal high-frequency expansions of spectral densities. It is also well known that the latter expansions are generally not literally true beyond the first term. However, the terms in the heat-kernel expansion correspond rigorously to quantities called Riesz means of the spectral expansion, which damp out oscillations in the spectral density at high frequencies by dint of performing an average over the density at all lower frequencies. In general, a change of variables leads to new Riesz means that contain different information from the old ones. In particular, for the standard second-order elliptic operators, Riesz means with respect to the square root of the spectral parameter correspond to terms in the asymptotics of elliptic and hyperbolic Green functions associated with the operator, and these quantities contain "nonlocal" information not contained in the usual Riesz means and their correlates in the heat kernel. Here the relationship between these two sets of Riesz means is worked out in detail; this involves just classical one-dimensional analysis and calculation, with no substantive input from spectral theory or quantum field theory. This work provides a general framework for calculations that are often carried out piecemeal (and without precise understanding of their rigorous meaning) in the physics literature.