Note on norm and pointwise convergence of exponential products and their integral kernels for the harmonic oscillator (Q2481549)

This paper deals with the rate of convergence in the Trotter--Kato formula (symmetric case). Recently, \textit{T.\,Ichinose} and \textit{H.\,Tamura} [Commun.\ Partial Differ.\ Equations 29, No.\,~11--12, 1905--1918 (2004; Zbl 1085.47053)] considered the Schrödinger semigroup in the the Sobolev space and obtained a sharp error bound \(O(n^{-2})\) for the norm convergence. The present paper continues this effort. The authors focus this time on the one-dimensional harmonic oscillator \(H = H_0 + V\), where \(H_0= - \frac12 \Delta\), \(V= \frac12 x^{2}\), and obtain some improvements of the previous result. Namely, it is shown that for every fixed \(T > 0\) and sufficiently large \(n\), one has the estimate \[ c(t)n^{-2}\leq\| [e^{-\frac{tV}{2n}}e^{-\frac{tH_0}{n}}e^{-\frac{tV}{2n}}]^{n}-e^{tH}\|\leq C(t)n^{-2} \] for all \(0\leq t\leq T\), where \(c(t),C(t)\) are positive bounded continuous functions with \(c(0) C(0)=0\). Pointwise convergence is also considered.