Arbitrarily small perturbations of Dirichlet Laplacians are quantum unique ergodic (Q1668116)

The celebrated quantum ergodicity theorem, proved by \textit{A. I. Shnirel'man} [Usp. Mat. Nauk 29, No. 6(180), 181--182 (1974; Zbl 0324.58020)], \textit{S. Zelditch} [Duke Math. J. 55, 919--941 (1987; Zbl 0643.58029)] and \textit{Y. Colin de Verdière} [Commun. Math. Phys. 102, 497--502 (1985; Zbl 0592.58050)], states that if the geodesic flow on a compact manifold \((M,g)\) is ergodic, then for any orthonormal basis of eigenfunctions of \(\Delta_g\), \(\{u_j\}\), there is a density 1 subsequence \(\{u_j'\}\) such that the sequence of measures \(\{|u_j'|^2dV_g\}\) converges weakly to the uniform probablity measure on \(M\) as \(j\rightarrow \infty\). The quantum unique ergodicity (QUE) conjecture of \textit{Z. Rudnick} and \textit{P. Sarnak} [Commun. Math. Phys. 161, No. 1, 195--213 (1994; Zbl 0836.58043)] asserts that such equidistribution phenomena (in phase space) should hold for the full orthonormal basis of eigenfunctions on a compact hyperbolic manifold. Even though it is known that QUE does not hold for general Euclidean domains with ergodic billiard flow, it is believed that QUE is generically valid in this case. The authors of the paper under review prove a few interesting results in support of the above belief. Their main result is the following. For a Euclidean domain \(\Omega\subset \mathbb R^d\) satisfying some mild regularity assumptions and a given \(\epsilon>0\), there exists a perturbation of the Euclidean Laplacian of the form \(-(I+S_\epsilon)\Delta\) with \(\|S_\epsilon\|_{L^2\rightarrow L^2}\leq \epsilon\), whose Dirichlet eigenfunctions are QUE. The authors also show that if additional regularity assumptions are imposed on the domain, such a perturbation can be choosen to satisfy \(\|S_\epsilon\|_{L^2\rightarrow H^\gamma}\leq \epsilon\) for some \(\gamma>0\) that relies on the regularity assumptions. In particular, if the boundary of \(\Omega\) is smooth, and the set of periodic billiards trajectories has measure zero, then \(\gamma\) can be taken to be \(1\).