Smooth Feshbach map and operator-theoretic renormalization group methods
Abstract A new variant of the isospectral Feshbach map defined on operators in Hilbert space is presented. It is constructed with the help of a smooth partition of unity, instead of projections, and is therefore called smooth Feshbach map . It is an effective tool in spectral and singular perturbation theory. As an illustration of its power, a novel operator-theoretic renormalization group method is described and applied to analyze a general class of Hamiltonians on Fock space. The main advantage of the new renormalization group method over its predecessors is its technical simplicity, which it owes to the use of the smooth Feshbach map.
The renormalized electron mass in non-relativistic quantum electrodynamics
This work addresses the problem of infrared mass renormalization for a scalar electron in a translation-invariant model of non-relativistic QED. We assume that the interaction of the electron with the quantized electromagnetic field comprises a fixed ultraviolet regularization and an infrared regularization parametrized by $\sigma>0$. For the value $p=0$ of the conserved total momentum of electron and photon field, bounds on the renormalized mass are established which are uniform in $\sigma\to0$, and the existence of a ground state is proved. For $|p|>0$ sufficiently small, bounds on the renormalized mass are derived for any fixed $\sigma>0$. A key ingredient of our proofs is the operator-t…
Instability of Equilibrium States for Coupled Heat Reservoirs at Different Temperatures
Abstract We consider quantum systems consisting of a “small” system coupled to two reservoirs (called open systems). We show that such systems have no equilibrium states normal with respect to any state of the decoupled system in which the reservoirs are at different temperatures, provided that either the temperatures or the temperature difference divided by the product of the temperatures are not too small. Our proof involves an elaborate spectral analysis of a general class of generators of the dynamics of open quantum systems, including quantum Liouville operators (“positive temperature Hamiltonians”) which generate the dynamics of the systems under consideration.