An uncertainty principle on compact manifolds (Q498956): Difference between revisions

The Breitenberger's uncertainty principle on the torus \(\mathbb{T}\) and its higher-dimensional analogue on \(\mathbb{S}^{d-1}\) are well known. The author describes an entire family of uncertainty principles on compact manifolds \((M,g)\), which includes the classical Heisenberg-Weyl uncertainty principle (for \(M=B(0,1)\subset\mathbb{R}^d\) the unit ball with the flat metric) and the Goh-Goodman uncertainty principle (for \(M=\mathbb{S}^{d-1}\) with the canonical metric) as special cases. This raises a new geometric problem related to small-curvature low-distortion embeddings: given a function \(f:M\to\mathbb{R}\), which uncertainty principle in our family yields the best result? The author gives a (far from optimal) answer for the torus, discusses disconnected manifolds and states a variety of other open problems.