On contact interactions realised as Friedrichs systems (Q2312993)

The authors investigate the relation between contact interactions in quantum mechanics and Friedrichs systems on a Hilbert space. The former are perturbations of elliptic (pseudo)differential operators, such as \(-\Delta\), where the perturbation is supported on a manifold of positive co-dimension. The perturbed operator may be realized as a self-adjoint extension of the unperturbed operator which is first restricted to the complement of the above mentioned manifold, or using, e.g., quadratic form techniques, regularization methods, non-standard analysis, etc. Such systems are well understood and a vast survey may be found, e.g., in [\textit{S. Albeverio} et al., Solvable models in quantum mechanics. With an appendix by Pavel Exner. 2nd revised ed. Providence, RI: AMS Chelsea Publishing (2005; Zbl 1078.81003)]. The authors summarize essential results concerning such operators in Section 3. The fundamental question within the framework of abstract Friedrichs systems on a Hilbert space is whether one can find sufficient geometric conditions such that a linear operator and its adjoint are bijective. This problem has been studied extensively, e.g., in [\textit{A. Ern} et al., Commun. Partial Differ. Equations 32, No. 2, 317--341 (2007; Zbl 1118.47003)] , [\textit{N. Antonić} et al., J. Math. Phys. 58, No. 10, 101508, 22 p. (2017; Zbl 06804375)], and [\textit{N. Antonić} et al., J. Differ. Equations 263, No. 12, 8264--8294 (2017; Zbl 1439.35132)]. The precise notions and a summary of crucial results for Friedrichs systems on Hilbert spaces are contained in Section 2. \medskip Understanding the relationship between the above mentioned geometric conditions for abstract Friedrichs operators and the boundary conditions in the definition of contact interaction Hamiltonians is the key ingredient in the derivation of their main result. The authors show that such Hamiltonians are indeed special classes (and in fact novel examples) of abstract Friedrichs systems (Section 4). The correspondance between these two classes of operators is studied in detail in the case of \(\delta\) interactions in one and three dimensions and in the case of \(\delta'\) interactions in one dimension (Sections 5--7).