Generalised Quantum Waveguides

Abstract

We study general quantum waveguides and establish explicit effective Hamiltonians for the Laplacian on these spaces. A conventional quantum waveguide is an $\varepsilon$-tubular neighbourhood of a curve in $\mathbb{R}^3$ and the object of interest is the Dirichlet Laplacian on this tube in the asymptotic limit $\varepsilon\to0$. We generalise this by considering fibre bundles $M$ over a $d$-dimensional submanifold $B\subset\mathbb{R}^{d+k}$ with fibres diffeomorphic to $F\subset\mathbb{R}^k$, whose total space is embedded into an $\varepsilon$-neighbourhood of $B$. From this point of view $B$ takes the role of the curve and $F$ that of the disc-shaped cross-section of a conventional quantum waveguide. Our approach allows, among other things, for waveguides whose cross-sections $F$ are deformed along $B$ and also the study of the Laplacian on the boundaries of such waveguides. By applying recent results on the adiabatic limit of Schr\"odinger operators on fibre bundles we show, in particular, that for small energies the dynamics and the spectrum of the Laplacian on $M$ are reflected by the adiabatic approximation associated to the ground state band of the normal Laplacian. We give explicit formulas for the according effective operator on $L^2(B)$ in various scenarios, thereby improving and extending many of the known results on quantum waveguides and quantum layers in $\mathbb{R}^3$.