Georgia Institute of Technology College of Sciences

TBA

Consider a relativistic electron interacting with a nucleus of nuclear charge Z and coupled to its self-generated electromagnetic field. The resulting system of equations describing the time evolution of this electron and its corresponding vector potential are known as the Maxwell-Dirac-Coulomb (MDC) equations. We study the time local well-posedness of the MDC equations, and, under reasonable restrictions on the nuclear charge Z, we prove the existence of a unique local in time solution to these equations.

The expectation values of the first and second moments of the quantum mechanical spin operator can be used to define a spin vector and spin fluctuation tensor, respectively. The former is a vector inside the unit ball in three space, while the latter is represented by an ellipsoid in three space. They are both experimentally accessible in many physical systems. By considering transport of the spin vector along loops in the unit ball it is shown that the spin fluctuation tensor picks up geometric phase information. For the physically important case of spin one, the geometric phase is formulated in terms of an SO(3) operator. Loops defined in the unit ball fall into two classes: those which do not pass through the origin and those which pass through the origin. The former class of loops subtend a well defined solid angle at the origin while the latter do not and the corresponding geometric phase is non-Abelian. To deal with both classes, a notion of generalized solid angle is introduced, which helps to clarify the interpretation of the geometric phase information. The experimental systems that can be used to observe this geometric phase are also discussed.Link to arxiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1702.08564

Quantum theory includes many well-developed bounds for wave-functions, which can cast light on where they can be localized and where they are largely excluded by the tunneling effect. These include semiclassical estimates, especially the technique of Agmon, the use of "landscape functions," and some bounds from the theory of ordinary differential equations. With A. Maltsev of Queen Mary University I have been studying how these estimates of wave functions can be adapted to quantum graphs, which are by definition networks of one-dimensional Schrödinger equations joined at vertices.