The magnetic Laplacian in shrinking tubular neighbourhoods of hypersurfaces

Abstract

The Dirichlet Laplacian between two parallel hypersurfaces in Euclidean spaces of any dimension in the presence of a magnetic field is considered in the limit when the distance between the hypersurfaces tends to zero. We show that the Laplacian converges in a norm-resolvent sense to a Schroedinger operator on the limiting hypersurface whose electromagnetic potential is expressed in terms of principal curvatures and the projection of the ambient vector potential to the hypersurface. As an application, we obtain an effective approximation of bound-state energies and eigenfunctions in thin quantum layers.