Der-Chen Chang – författare

Differential geometry techniques have very useful and important applications in partial differential equations and quantum mechanics. This work presents a purely geometric treatment of problems in physics involving quantum harmonic oscillators, quartic oscillators, minimal surfaces, and Schrödinger''s, Einstein''s and Newton''s equations.

Geometric Mechanics on Riemannian Manifolds is a fine text for a course or seminar directed at graduate and advanced undergraduate students interested in elliptic and hyperbolic differential equations, differential geometry, calculus of variations, quantum mechanics, and physics. The text is enriched with good examples and exercises at the end of every chapter. It is also an ideal resource for pure and applied mathematicians and theoretical physicists working in these areas.

With each methodology treated in its own chapter, this monograph is a thorough exploration of several theories that can be used to find explicit formulas for heat kernels for both elliptic and sub-elliptic operators. The authors show how to find heat kernels for classical operators by employing a number of different methods. Some of these methods come from stochastic processes, others from quantum physics, and yet others are purely mathematical.

What is new about this work is the sheer diversity of methods that are used to compute the heat kernels. It is interesting that such apparently distinct branches of mathematics, including stochastic processes, differential geometry, special functions, quantum mechanics and PDEs, all have a common concept – the heat kernel. This unifying concept, that brings together so many domains of mathematics, deserves dedicated study.

Heat Kernels for Elliptic and Sub-elliptic Operators is an ideal resource for graduate students, researchers, and practitioners in pure and applied mathematics as well as theoretical physicists interested in understanding different ways of approaching evolution operators.

The book constructs explicitly the fundamental solution of the sub-Laplacian operator for a family of model domains in Cn+1. This type of domain is a good point-wise model for a Cauchy-Rieman (CR) manifold with diagonalizable Levi form. Qualitative results for such operators have been studied extensively, but exact formulas are difficult to derive. Exact formulas are closely related to the underlying geometry and lead to equations of classical types such as hypergeometric equations and Whittaker’s equations.