Are you looking for a concise summary of the theory of Schrödinger operators? Here it is. Emphasizing the progress made in the last decade by Lieb, Enss, Witten and others, the three authors don’t just cover general properties, but also detail multiparticle quantum mechanics – including bound states of Coulomb systems and scattering theory. This corrected and extended reprint contains updated references as well as notes on the development in the field over the past twenty years.

The book is devoted to perturbation theory for the Schrödinger operator with a periodic potential, describing motion of a particle in bulk matter. The Bloch eigenvalues of the operator are densely situated in a high energy region, so regular perturbation theory is ineffective. The mathematical difficulties have a physical nature - a complicated picture of diffraction inside the crystal. The author develops a new mathematical approach to this problem. It provides mathematical physicists with important results for this operator and a new technique that can be effective for other problems. The semiperiodic Schrödinger operator, describing a crystal with a surface, is studied. Solid-body theory specialists can find asymptotic formulae, which are necessary for calculating many physical values.

The authors consider a Schrödinger operator H=−Δ+V(x⃗ ) in dimension two with a quasi-periodic potential V(x⃗ ). They prove that the absolutely continuous spectrum of H contains a semiaxis and there is a family of generalized eigenfunctions at every point of this semiaxis with the following properties. First, the eigenfunctions are close to plane waves ei⟨ϰ⃗ ,x⃗ ⟩ in the high energy region. Second, the isoenergetic curves in the space of momenta ϰ⃗ corresponding to these eigenfunctions have the form of slightly distorted circles with holes (Cantor type structure). A new method of multiscale analysis in the momentum space is developed to prove these results. The result is based on a previous paper on the quasiperiodic polyharmonic operator (−Δ)l+V(x⃗ ), l>1. Here the authors address technical complications arising in the case l=1. However, this text is self-contained and can be read without familiarity with the previous paper.

This book describes the direct and inverse problems of the multidimensional Schrödinger operator with a periodic potential, a topic that is especially important in perturbation theory, constructive determination of spectral invariants and finding the periodic potential from the given Bloch eigenvalues. It provides a detailed derivation of the asymptotic formulas for Bloch eigenvalues and Bloch functions in arbitrary dimensions while constructing and estimating the measure of the iso-energetic surfaces in the high-energy regime. Moreover, it presents a unique method proving the validity of the Bethe-Sommerfeld conjecture for arbitrary dimensions and arbitrary lattices. Using the perturbation theory constructed, it determines the spectral invariants of the multidimensional operator from the given Bloch eigenvalues. Some of these invariants are explicitly expressed by the Fourier coefficients of the potential, making it possible to determine the potential constructively using Bloch eigenvalues as input data. Lastly, the book presents an algorithm for the unique determination of the potential. This updated second edition includes an additional chapter that specifically focuses on lower-dimensional cases, providing the basis for the higher-dimensional considerations of the chapters that follow.

This Festschrift had its origins in a conference called SimonFest held at Caltech, March 27-31, 2006, to honor Barry Simon's 60th birthday. It is not a proceedings volume in the usual sense since the emphasis of the majority of the contributions is on reviews of the state of the art of certain fields, with particular focus on recent developments and open problems. The bulk of the articles in this Festschrift are of this survey form, and a few review Simon's contributions to aparticular area. Part 1 contains surveys in the areas of Quantum Field Theory, Statistical Mechanics, Nonrelativistic Two-Body and $N$-Body Quantum Systems, Resonances, Quantum Mechanics with Electric and Magnetic Fields, and the Semiclassical Limit. Part 2 contains surveys in the areas of Random andErgodic Schrodinger Operators, Singular Continuous Spectrum, Orthogonal Polynomials, and Inverse Spectral Theory. In several cases, this collection of surveys portrays both the history of a subject and its current state of the art. A substantial part of the contributions to this Festschrift are survey articles on the state of the art of certain areas with special emphasis on open problems. This will benefit graduate students as well as researchers who want to get a quick, yet comprehensiveintroduction into an area covered in this volume.