Bloch bundles, Marzari-Vanderbilt functional and maximally localized Wannier functions (Q358806)

The authors consider a periodic Schrödinger operator and the composite Wannier functions corresponding to a relevant family of its Bloch bands, separated by a gap from the rest of the spectrum. They study the associated localization functional introduced by \textit{N. Marzari} and \textit{B. Vanderbilt} [``Maximally localized generalized Wannier functions for composite energy bands'', Phys Rev B 56, No. 20, 12847--12865 (1997; \url{doi:10.1103/PhysRevB.56.12847})] (the Marzari-Vanderbilt (MV) localization functional), \[ F_{MV}(w)=\sum_{\alpha=1}^mF_{MV}(w_a) =\sum_{\alpha=1}^m\int_{\mathbb{R}^d}|x|^2|w_a|^2dx-\sum_{\alpha=1}^m \sum_{j=1}^d\bigg(\int_{\mathbb{R}^d}|x|^2|w_a|^2dx\bigg)^2 \] for a system of \(L^2 \) functions \( w=\{w_1,\dotsc,w_m\}\subset L^2(\mathbb{R}^d). \) The authors prove that minimizers of the MV functional do exist for dimension \(d\leq 3\) in a suitable function space. Besides, they state that the minimizers of the MV functional are exponentially localized.