Scale-free and quantitative unique continuation for infinite dimensional spectral subspaces of Schr\"odinger operators

TL;DR

This paper establishes a quantitative unique continuation principle for infinite dimensional spectral subspaces of Schrödinger operators, providing explicit bounds and allowing for exponential decay conditions, which is novel in the spectral analysis of such operators.

Contribution

It introduces a new unique continuation estimate for infinite spectral subspaces of Schrödinger operators with explicit constants, accommodating exponential decay conditions.

Findings

Validates exponential decay conditions for spectral subspaces

Provides explicit bounds independent of domain size

Shows polynomial decay conditions are insufficient

Abstract

We prove a quantitative unique continuation principle for infinite dimensional spectral subspaces of Schr\"odinger operators. Let $\Lambda_L = (-L/2,L/2)^d$ and $H_L = -\Delta_L + V_L$ be a Schr\"odinger operator on $L^2 (\Lambda_L)$ with a bounded potential $V_L : \Lambda_L \to \mathbb{R}^d$ and Dirichlet, Neumann, or periodic boundary conditions. Our main result is of the type \[ \int_{\Lambda_L} \lvert \phi \rvert^2 \leq C_{\mathrm{sfuc}} \int_{W_\delta (L)} \lvert \phi \rvert^2, \] where $\phi$ is an infinite complex linear combination of eigenfunctions of $H_L$ with exponentially decaying coefficients, $W_\delta (L)$ is some union of equidistributed $\delta$-balls in $\Lambda_L$ and $C_{\mathrm{sfuc}} > 0$ an $L$-independent constant. The exponential decay condition on $\phi$ can alternatively be formulated as an exponential decay condition of the map $\lambda \mapsto \lVert \chi_{[\lambda , \infty)} (H_L) \phi \rVert^2$. The novelty is that at the same time we allow the function $\phi$ to be from an infinite dimensional spectral subspace and keep an explicit control over the constant $C_{\mathrm{sfuc}}$ in terms of the parameters. Moreover, we show that a similar result cannot hold under a polynomial decay condition.