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.

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 describes the direct problems and the inverse problem of the multidimensional Schrödinger operator with a periodic potential. This concerns perturbation theory and constructive determination of the spectral invariants and finding the periodic potential from the given Bloch eigenvalues. The unique method of this book derives the asymptotic formulas for Bloch eigenvalues and Bloch functions for arbitrary dimension. Moreover, the measure of the iso-energetic surfaces in the high energy region is construct and estimated. It implies the validity of the Bethe-Sommerfeld conjecture for arbitrary dimensions and arbitrary lattices. Using the perturbation theory constructed in this book, the spectral invariants of the multidimensional operator from the given Bloch eigenvalues are determined. Some of these invariants are explicitly expressed by the Fourier coefficients of the potential. This way the possibility to determine the potential constructively by using Bloch eigenvalues as input data is given. In the end an algorithm for the unique determination of the potential is given.

Linear differential equations with periodic coefficients constitute a well developed part of the theory of ordinary differential equations [17, 94, 156, 177, 178, 272, 389]. They arise in many physical and technical applications [177, 178, 272]. A new wave of interest in this subject has been stimulated during the last two decades by the development of the inverse scattering method for integration of nonlinear differential equations. This has led to significant progress in this traditional area [27, 71, 72, 111 119, 250, 276, 277, 284, 286, 287, 312, 313, 337, 349, 354, 392, 393, 403, 404]. At the same time, many theoretical and applied problems lead to periodic partial differential equations. We can mention, for instance, quantum mechanics [14, 18, 40, 54, 60, 91, 92, 107, 123, 157-160, 192, 193, 204, 315, 367, 412, 414, 415, 417], hydrodynamics [179, 180], elasticity theory [395], the theory of guided waves [87-89, 208, 300], homogenization theory [29, 41, 348], direct and inverse scattering [175, 206, 216, 314, 388, 406-408], parametric resonance theory [122, 178], and spectral theory and spectral geometry [103 105, 381, 382, 389]. There is a sjgnificant distinction between the cases of ordinary and partial differential periodic equations. The main tool of the theory of periodic ordinary differential equations is the so-called Floquet theory [17, 94, 120, 156, 177, 267, 272, 389]. Its central result is the following theorem (sometimes called Floquet-Lyapunov theorem) [120, 267].

The volume contains the proceedings of the OTAMP 2006 (Operator Theory, Analysis and Mathematical Physics) conference held at Lund University in June 2006. The conference was devoted to the methods of analysis and operator theory in modern mathematical physics. The following special sessions were organized: Spectral analysis of Schrödinger operators; Jacobi and CMV matrices and orthogonal polynomials; Quasi-periodic and random Schrödinger operators; Quantum graphs.