Some nodal properties of the quantum harmonic oscillator and other Schr{\"o}dinger operators in $\mathbb{R}^2$

TL;DR

This paper investigates the nodal properties of eigenfunctions for the 2D quantum harmonic oscillator and Schr{"o}dinger operators, establishing existence results and bounds on nodal set lengths in relation to eigenvalues.

Contribution

It extends classical nodal domain results to the quantum harmonic oscillator and provides bounds on nodal set lengths for Schr{"o}dinger operators in .

Findings

Existence of eigenfunctions with exactly two nodal domains for the quantum harmonic oscillator.

Construction of eigenfunctions with nearly maximal nodal domains according to Courant's theorem.

Bounds on the length of nodal sets in the classically permitted region for Schr{"o}dinger operators.

Abstract

For the spherical Laplacian on the sphere and for the Dirichlet Laplacian in the square}, Antonie Stern claimed in her PhD thesis (1924) the existence of an infinite sequence of eigenvalues whose corresponding eigenspaces contain an eigenfunction with exactly two nodal domains. These results were given complete proofs respectively by Hans Lewy in 1977, and the authors in 2014 (see also Gauthier-Shalom--Przybytkowski, 2006). In this paper, we obtain similar results for the two dimensional isotropic quantum harmonic oscillator. In the opposite direction, we construct an infinite sequence of regular eigenfunctions with as many nodal domains as allowed by Courant's theorem, up to a factor $\frac{1}{4}$. A classical question for a $2$-dimensional bounded domain is to estimate the length of the nodal set of a Dirichlet eigenfunction in terms of the square root of the energy. In the last section, we consider some Schr{\"o}dinger operators $-\Delta + V$ in $\mathbb{R}^2$ and we provide bounds for the length of the nodal set of an eigenfunction with energy $\lambda$ in the classically permitted region $\{V(x) < \lambda\}$.