Intertwining operators beyond the Stark Effect

TL;DR

This paper develops a general framework for intertwining operators beyond the classical Stark effect, analyzing their properties for non-constant spherical perturbations in quantum Hamiltonians across multiple dimensions.

Contribution

It introduces a broad class of intertwining operators for non-constant spherical perturbations and studies their mapping properties, extending previous work on constant perturbations.

Findings

Established a complete analysis for 2D Schrödinger operators with magnetic and electric potentials.

Proved dispersive and resolvent estimates for these operators in 2D.

Conjectured results for higher dimensions with symmetric potentials.

Abstract

The main mathematical manifestation of the Stark effect in quantum mechanics is the shift and the formation of clusters of eigenvalues when a spherical Hamiltonian is perturbed by lower order terms. Understanding this mechanism turned out to be fundamental in the description of the large-time asymptotics of the associated Schr\"odinger groups and can be responsible for the lack of dispersion in Fanelli, Felli, Fontelos and Primo [Comm. Math. Phys., 324(2013), 1033-1067; 337(2015), 1515-1533]. Recently, Miao, Su, and Zheng introduced in [Tran. Amer. Math. Soc., 376(2023), 1739--1797] a family of spectrally projected intertwining operators, reminiscent of the Kato's wave operators, in the case of constant perturbations on the sphere (inverse-square potential), and also proved their boundedness in $L^p$. Our aim is to establish a general framework in which some suitable intertwining operators can be defined also for non constant spherical perturbations in space dimensions 2 and higher. In addition, we investigate the mapping properties between $L^p$-spaces of these operators. In 2D, we prove a complete result, for the Schr\"odinger Hamiltonian with a (fixed) magnetic potential an electric potential, both scaling critical, allowing us to prove dispersive estimates, uniform resolvent estimates, and $L^p$-bounds of Bochner--Riesz means. In higher dimensions, apart from recovering the example of inverse-square potential, we can conjecture a complete result in presence of some symmetries (zonal potentials), and open some interesting spectral problems concerning the asymptotics of eigenfunctions.