Scattering for Schr\"{o}dinger operators with potentials concentrated near a subspace

Abstract

We study the scattering properties of Schr\"{o}dinger operators with bounded potentials concentrated near a subspace of $\mathbb{R}^d$. For such operators, we show the existence of scattering states and characterize their orthogonal complement as a set of surface states, which consists of states that are confined to the subspace (such as pure point states) and states that escape it at a sublinear rate, in a suitable sense. We provide examples of surface states for different systems including those that propagate along the subspace and those that escape the subspace arbitrarily slowly. Our proof uses a novel interpretation of the Enss method in order to obtain a dynamical characterisation of the orthogonal complement of the scattering states.