We consider a 2D Schroedinger operator H0 with constant magnetic field, on a strip of finite width. The spectrum of H0 is absolutely continuous, and contains a discrete set of thresholds. We perturb H0 by an electric potential V which decays in a sui
table sense at infinity, and study the spectral properties of the perturbed operator H = H0 + V . First, we establish a Mourre estimate, and as a corollary prove that the singular continuous spectrum of H is empty, and any compact subset of the complement of the threshold set may contain at most a finite set of eigenvalues of H, each of them having a finite multiplicity. Next, we introduce the Krein spectral shift function (SSF) for the operator pair (H,H0). We show that this SSF is bounded on any compact subset of the complement of the threshold set, and is continuous away from the threshold set and the eigenvalues of H. The main results of the article concern the asymptotic behaviour of the SSF at the thresholds, which is described in terms of the SSF for a pair of effective Hamiltonians.
The main motivation of this article is to derive sufficient conditions for dynamical stability of periodically driven quantum systems described by a Hamiltonian H(t), i.e., conditions under which it holds sup_{t in R} | (psi(t),H(t) psi(t)) |<infty w
here psi(t) denotes a trajectory at time t of the quantum system under consideration. We start from an analysis of the domain of the quasi-energy operator. Next we show, under certain assumptions, that if the spectrum of the monodromy operator U(T,0) is pure point then there exists a dense subspace of initial conditions for which the mean value of energy is uniformly bounded in the course of time. Further we show that if the propagator admits a differentiable Floquet decomposition then || H(t) psi(t) || is bounded in time for any initial condition psi(0), and one employs the quantum KAM algorithm to prove the existence of this type of decomposition for a fairly large class of H(t). In addition, we derive bounds uniform in time on transition probabilities between different energy levels, and we also propose an extension of this approach to the case of a higher order of differentiability of the Floquet decomposition. The procedure is demonstrated on a solvable example of the periodically time-dependent harmonic oscillator.
