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RESEARCH PRODUCT

Scattering resonances and Pseudospectrum : stability and completeness aspects in optical and gravitational systems

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description

The general context of this thesis is an effort to establish a bridge between gravitational andoptical physics, specifically in the context of scattering problems using as a guideline concepts andtools taken from the theory of non-self-adjoint operators. Our focus is on Quasi-Normal Modes(QNMs), namely the natural resonant modes of open leaky structures under linear perturbationssubject to outgoing boundary conditions. They also are referred to as scattering resonances.In the conservative self-adjoint case the spectral theorem guarantees the completeness andspectral stability of the associated normal modes. In this sense, a natural question in the non-self-adjoint setting refers to the characterization and assessment of appropriate notions of QNMcompleteness and spectral stability in open non-conservative systems. This defines the generalobjective of this thesis. To this aim, and in contrast with the traditional approach to scatter-ing resonances, we adopt a methodology in which QNMs are cast as a spectral problem of anappropriate non-self-adjoint operator. Specifically this methodology is based on following threeingredients:(i) Hyperboloidal approach: The hyperboloidal slicing approach is already used in gravitationalproblems, we introduced it here to optical ones. The idea is to study the wave equationin hyperbolic slices instead of usually used Cauchy slices. The system of coordinates ismore adapted to the problem of QNMs and its outgoing boundary conditions, in particularaddressing the exploding modes in the Cauchy approach. The modes are normalizable insuch coordinates and working in these slices eliminate the need of imposing the outgoingboundary conditions.(ii) Pseudospectrum of an operator: the notion of epsilon-pseudospectrum allows to assess the (in)stabilityof eigenvalues of an operator in the complex plane due to a perturbation to the operator oforder epsilon. This thesis introduces the notion of pseudospectrum in gravitational and opticalphysics in the vicinity of the eigenvalues.(iii) Numerical Chebyshev spectral methods: On the technical level, spectral methods providesan efficient tool when translating the problem into a numerical one. In particular we usedChebyshev basis to expand our fields.The results of this work touch three areas:(i) The instability of QNMs for some class of potentials. The fundamental modes are stablespecially under small "high frequency" perturbations, whereas overtones are sensitive tosuch perturbations. The instability of the overtones increases as their imaginary part grows.(ii) The universality of the asymptotic behaviour of QNMs and pseudospectrum. We remarkan asymptotically logarithmic behavior of pseudospectrum contour lines and bounding theopening QNMs branches from below.(iii) QNMs expansion. We revisit Lax & Phillips asymptotic resonant expansions of a "scattered field" in terms of QNMs in our physical settings. In particular , we make use of Keldysh expansion of the generalizations of the expressions for normal modes of conservative systems, specifically in terms of normalizable QNM eigenfunctions and explicit expressions for the excitation coefficients.