Elliott H. Lieb – författare

Research into the stability of matter has been one of the most successful chapters in mathematical physics, and is a prime example of how modern mathematics can be applied to problems in physics. A unique account of the subject, this book provides a complete, self-contained description of research on the stability of matter problem. It introduces the necessary quantum mechanics to mathematicians, and aspects of functional analysis to physicists. The topics covered include electrodynamics of classical and quantized fields, Lieb-Thirring and other inequalities in spectral theory, inequalities in electrostatics, stability of large Coulomb systems, gravitational stability of stars, basics of equilibrium statistical mechanics, and the existence of the thermodynamic limit. The book is an up-to-date account for researchers, and its pedagogical style makes it suitable for advanced undergraduate and graduate courses in mathematical physics.

Some of the articles in this collection give up-to-date accounts of areas in mathematical physics to which Valentine Bargmann made pioneering contributions. The others treat a selection of the most interesting current topics in the field. The contributions include both reviews and original results. Contents: The Inverse r-Squared Force (Henry D. I. Abarbanel; Certain Hilbert Spaces of Analytic Functions Associated with the Heisenberg Group (Donald Babbitt); Lower Bound for the Ground State Energy of the Schrodinger Equation Using the Sharp Form of Young's Inequality (John F. Barnes, Herm Jan Brascamp, and Elliott II. Lieb); Alternative Theories of Gravitation (Peter G. Bergmann; )Generalized Wronskian Relations (F. Calogero); Old and New Approaches to the Inverse-Scattering Problem (Freeman J. Dyson); A Family of Optimal Conditions for the Absence of Bound States in a Potential (V. Glaser, A. Martin, H. Grosse, and W. Thirring); Spinning Tops in External Fields (Sergio Hojman and Tullio Regge); Measures on the Finite Dimensional Subspaces of a Hilbert Space (Res Jost); The Froissart Bound and Crossing Symmetry (N. N. Khuri); Intertwining Operators for SL(n,R) (A. W. Knapp and E.M. Stein); Inequalities for the Moments of the Eigenvalues of the Schrodinger Hamiltonian and Their Relations to Sobolev Inequalities (Elliott H. Lieb and Walter Thirriny); On the Number of Bound States of Two Body Schrodinger Operators (Barry Simon); Quantum Dynamics: From Automorphism to Hamiltonian (Barry Simon); Semiclassical Analysis Illuminates the Connection between Potential and Bound States and Scattering (John Archibald Wheeler); Instability Phenomena in the External Field Problem for Two Classes of Relativistic Wave Equations (A. S. Wightman) Originally published in 1976. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Some of the articles in this collection give up-to-date accounts of areas in mathematical physics to which Valentine Bargmann made pioneering contributions. The others treat a selection of the most interesting current topics in the field. The contributions include both reviews and original results. Contents: The Inverse r-Squared Force (Henry D. I. Abarbanel; Certain Hilbert Spaces of Analytic Functions Associated with the Heisenberg Group (Donald Babbitt); Lower Bound for the Ground State Energy of the Schrodinger Equation Using the Sharp Form of Young's Inequality (John F. Barnes, Herm Jan Brascamp, and Elliott II. Lieb); Alternative Theories of Gravitation (Peter G. Bergmann; )Generalized Wronskian Relations (F. Calogero); Old and New Approaches to the Inverse-Scattering Problem (Freeman J. Dyson); A Family of Optimal Conditions for the Absence of Bound States in a Potential (V. Glaser, A. Martin, H. Grosse, and W. Thirring); Spinning Tops in External Fields (Sergio Hojman and Tullio Regge); Measures on the Finite Dimensional Subspaces of a Hilbert Space (Res Jost); The Froissart Bound and Crossing Symmetry (N. N. Khuri); Intertwining Operators for SL(n,R) (A. W. Knapp and E.M. Stein); Inequalities for the Moments of the Eigenvalues of the Schrodinger Hamiltonian and Their Relations to Sobolev Inequalities (Elliott H. Lieb and Walter Thirriny); On the Number of Bound States of Two Body Schrodinger Operators (Barry Simon); Quantum Dynamics: From Automorphism to Hamiltonian (Barry Simon); Semiclassical Analysis Illuminates the Connection between Potential and Bound States and Scattering (John Archibald Wheeler); Instability Phenomena in the External Field Problem for Two Classes of Relativistic Wave Equations (A. S. Wightman) Originally published in 1976. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Significantly revised and expanded, this new Second Edition provides readers at all levels - from beginning students to practicing analysts - with the basic concepts and standard tools necessary to solve problems of analysis, and how to apply these concepts to research in a variety of areas. Authors Elliott Lieb and Michael Loss take you quickly from basic topics to methods that work successfully in mathematics and its applications. While omitting many usual typical textbook topics, ""Analysis"" includes all necessary definitions, proofs, explanations, examples, and exercises to bring the reader to an advanced level of understanding with a minimum of fuss, and, at the same time, doing so in a rigorous and pedagogical way. Many topics that are useful and important, but usually left to advanced monographs, are presented in ""Analysis"", and these give the beginner a sense that the subject is alive and growing.This new Second Edition incorporates numerous changes since the publication of the original 1997 edition and includes: a new chapter on eigenvalues that covers the min-max principle, semi-classical approximation, coherent states, Lieb-Thirring inequalities, and more; extensive additions to chapters covering Sobolev Inequalities, including the Nash and Log Sobolev inequalities; new material on Measure and Integration; many new exercises; and, much more. ..The Second Edition continues its no-nonsense approach to the topic that has made it one of the best selling books on the subject. It is an authoritative, straight-forward volume that readers - from the graduate student, to the professional mathematician, to the physicist or engineer using analytical methods - will find useful both as a reference and as a guide to real problem solving.About the authors: Elliott Lieb is Professor of Mathematics and Physics at Princeton University and is a member of the US, Austrian, and Danish Academies of Science. He is also the recipient of several prizes including the 1988 AMS/SIAM Birkhoff Prize. Michael Loss is Professor of Mathematics at the Georgia Institute of Technology.

This fourth edition of selecta of my work on the stability of matter contains recent work on two topics that continue to fascinate me: Quantum electrodynamics (QED) and the Bose gas. Three papers have been added to Part VII on QED. As I mentioned in the preface to the third edition, there must be a way to formulate a non-perturbative QED, presumably with an ultraviolet cutoff, that correctly describes low energy physics, i.e., ordinary matter and its interaction with the electromagnetic field. The new paper VII.5, which “quantizes” the results in V.9, shows that the elementary ‘no-pair’ version of relativistic QED (using the Dirac operator) is unstable when many-body effects are taken into account. Stability can be restored, however, if the Dirac operator with the field, instead of the bare Dirac operator, is used to define an electron. Thus, the notion of a “bare” electron without its self-field is physically questionable.

This is the third Selecta of publications of Elliott Lieb, the first two being Stabil­ ity of Matter: From Atoms to Stars, edited by Walter Thirring, and Inequalities, edited by Michael Loss and Mary Beth Ruskai. A companion fourth Selecta on Statistical Mechanics is also edited by us. Elliott Lieb has been a pioneer of the discipline of mathematical physics as it is nowadays understood and continues to lead several of its most active directions today. For the first part of this selecta we have made a selection of Lieb's works on Condensed Matter Physics. The impact of Lieb's work in mathematical con­ densed matter physics is unrivaled. It is fair to say that if one were to name a founding father of the field, Elliott Lieb would be the only candidate to claim this singular position. While in related fields, such as Statistical Mechanics and Atomic Physics, many key problems are readily formulated in unambiguous mathematical form, this is less so in Condensed Matter Physics, where some say that rigor is "probably impossible and certainly unnecessary". By carefully select­ ing the most important questions and formulating them as well-defined mathemat­ ical problems, and then solving a good number of them, Lieb has demonstrated the quoted opinion to be erroneous on both counts. What is true, however, is that many of these problems turn out to be very hard. It is not unusual that they take a decade (even several decades) to solve.

This fourth edition of selecta of my work on the stability of matter contains recent work on two topics that continue to fascinate me: Quantum electrodynamics (QED) and the Bose gas. Three papers have been added to Part VII on QED. As I mentioned in the preface to the third edition, there must be a way to formulate a non-perturbative QED, presumably with an ultraviolet cutoff, that correctly describes low energy physics, i.e., ordinary matter and its interaction with the electromagnetic field. The new paper VII.5, which “quantizes” the results in V.9, shows that the elementary ‘no-pair’ version of relativistic QED (using the Dirac operator) is unstable when many-body effects are taken into account. Stability can be restored, however, if the Dirac operator with the field, instead of the bare Dirac operator, is used to define an electron. Thus, the notion of a “bare” electron without its self-field is physically questionable.

Inequalities play a fundamental role in Functional Analysis and it is widely recognized that finding them, especially sharp estimates, is an art. E. H. Lieb has discovered a host of inequalities that are enormously useful in mathematics as well as in physics. His results are collected in this book which should become a standard source for further research. Together with the mathematical proofs the author also presents numerous applications to the calculus of variations and to many problems of quantum physics, in particular to atomic physics.

This is the third Selecta of publications of Elliott Lieb, the first two being Stabil­ ity of Matter: From Atoms to Stars, edited by Walter Thirring, and Inequalities, edited by Michael Loss and Mary Beth Ruskai. A companion fourth Selecta on Statistical Mechanics is also edited by us. Elliott Lieb has been a pioneer of the discipline of mathematical physics as it is nowadays understood and continues to lead several of its most active directions today. For the first part of this selecta we have made a selection of Lieb's works on Condensed Matter Physics. The impact of Lieb's work in mathematical con­ densed matter physics is unrivaled. It is fair to say that if one were to name a founding father of the field, Elliott Lieb would be the only candidate to claim this singular position. While in related fields, such as Statistical Mechanics and Atomic Physics, many key problems are readily formulated in unambiguous mathematical form, this is less so in Condensed Matter Physics, where some say that rigor is "probably impossible and certainly unnecessary". By carefully select­ ing the most important questions and formulating them as well-defined mathemat­ ical problems, and then solving a good number of them, Lieb has demonstrated the quoted opinion to be erroneous on both counts. What is true, however, is that many of these problems turn out to be very hard. It is not unusual that they take a decade (even several decades) to solve.

Inequalities play a fundamental role in Functional Analysis and it is widely recognized that finding them, especially sharp estimates, is an art. E. H. Lieb has discovered a host of inequalities that are enormously useful in mathematics as well as in physics. His results are collected in this book which should become a standard source for further research. Together with the mathematical proofs the author also presents numerous applications to the calculus of variations and to many problems of quantum physics, in particular to atomic physics.

Inequalities play a fundamental role in Functional Analysis and it is widely recognized that finding them, especially sharp estimates, is an art. E. H. Lieb has discovered a host of inequalities that are enormously useful in mathematics as well as in physics. His results are collected in this book which should become a standard source for further research. Together with the mathematical proofs the author also presents numerous applications to the calculus of variations and to many problems of quantum physics, in particular to atomic physics.

With this book, Elliott Lieb joins his peers Hermann Weyl and Chen Ning Yang. Weyl''s Selecta was published in 1956, Yang''s Selected Papers in 1983. Lieb''s "Selecta", like its predecessors, gives us the essence of a great mathema­ tical physicist concentrated into one convenient volume. Weyl, Yang and Lieb have much more in common than the accident of this manner of publication. They have in common a style and a tradition. Each of them is master of a for­ midable mathematical technique. Each of them uses hard mathematical ana­ lysis to reach an understanding of physical laws. Each of them enriches both physics and mathematics by finding new mathematical depths in the description of familiar physical processes. The central theme of Weyl''s work in mathematical physics was the idea of symmetry, linking physical invariance-principles with the mathematics of group-theory. One of Yang''s central themes is the idea of a gauge field, linking physical interactions with the mathematics of fibre-bundles. The central theme of Lieb''s papers collected in this book is the classical Thomas-Fermi model of an atom, linking the physical stability of matter with the mathematics of func­ tional analysis. In all three cases, a rather simple physical idea provided the starting-point for building a grand and beautiful mathematical structure. Weyl, Yang and Lieb were not content with merely solving a problem. Each of them was concerned with understanding the deep mathematical roots out of which physical phenomena grow.

The first edition of "The Stability of Matter: From Atoms to Stars" was sold out after a time unusually short for a selecta collection and we thought it ap­ propriate not just to make a reprinting but to include eight new contributionso They demonstrate that this field is still lively and keeps revealing unexpected featureso Of course, we restricted ourselves to developments in which Elliott Lieb participated and thus the heroic struggle in Thomas-Fermi theory where 7 3 5 3 the accuracy has been pushed from Z 1 to Z 1 is not includedo A rich landscape opened up after Jakob Yngvason''s observation that atoms in magnetic fields also are described in suitable limits by a Thomas-Fermi-type theoryo Together with Elliott Lieb and Jan Philip Solovej it was eventually worked out that one has to distinguish 5 regionso If one takes as a dimensionless measure of the magnetic field strength B the ratio Larmor radius/Bohr radius one can compare it with N "'' Z and for each of the domains 4 3 (i) B « N 1 , 4 3 (ii) B "'' N 1 , 4 3 3 (iii) N 1« B « N , 3 (iv) B "'' N , 3 (v) B » N a different version ofmagnetic Thomas-Fermi theory becomes exact in the limit N --+ ooo In two dimensions and a confining potential ("quantum dots") the situation is somewhat simpler, one has to distinguish only (i) B « N, (ii) B "''N,

The second edition of this "selecta" of my work on the stability of matter was sold out and this presented an opportunity to add some newer work on the quantum­ mechanical many-body problem. In order to do so, and still keep the volume within manageable limits, it was necessary to delete a few papers that appeared in the previous editions. This was done without sacrificing content, however, since the material contained in the deleted papers still appears, in abbreviated form, at least, in other papers reprinted here. Seetions VII and VIII are new. The former is on quantum electrodynamics (QED), to which I was led by consideration of stability of the non-relativistic many-body Coulomb problem, as contained in the first and second editions. In particular, the fragility of stability of matter with c1assical magnetic fields, which requires abound on the fine-structure constant even in the non-relativistic case (item V.4), leads to the question of stability in a theory with quantized fields. There are many unresolved problems of QED if one attempts to develop a non­ perturbative theory - as everyone knows. A non-perturbative theory is essential, however, if one is going to understand the stability of the many-body problem, which is the stability of ordinary matter. Some physicists will say that a non­ perturbative QED does not exist - and this might be true in the absence of cutoffs - but an effective theory with cutoffs of a few Mev must exist since matter exists.

This is the third Selecta of publications of Elliott Lieb, the first two being Stabil­ ity of Matter: From Atoms to Stars, edited by Walter Thirring, and Inequalities, edited by Michael Loss and Mary Beth Ruskai. A companion fourth Selecta on Statistical Mechanics is also edited by us. Elliott Lieb has been a pioneer of the discipline of mathematical physics as it is nowadays understood and continues to lead several of its most active directions today. For the first part of this selecta we have made a selection of Lieb''s works on Condensed Matter Physics. The impact of Lieb''s work in mathematical con­ densed matter physics is unrivaled. It is fair to say that if one were to name a founding father of the field, Elliott Lieb would be the only candidate to claim this singular position. While in related fields, such as Statistical Mechanics and Atomic Physics, many key problems are readily formulated in unambiguous mathematical form, this is less so in Condensed Matter Physics, where some say that rigor is "probably impossible and certainly unnecessary". By carefully select­ ing the most important questions and formulating them as well-defined mathemat­ ical problems, and then solving a good number of them, Lieb has demonstrated the quoted opinion to be erroneous on both counts. What is true, however, is that many of these problems turn out to be very hard. It is not unusual that they take a decade (even several decades) to solve.

The mathematical study of the Bose gas goes back to the ?rst quarter of the twentieth century, with the invention of quantum mechanics. The name refers to the Indian physicist S.N. Bose who realized in 1924 that the statistics governing photons(essentiallyinventedbyMaxPlanckin1900)isdetermined(usingmodern terminology) by restricting the physical Hilbert space to be the symmetric tensor product of single photon states. Shortly afterwards, Einstein applied this idea to massive particles, such as a gas of atoms, and discovered the phenomenon that we now call Bose-Einstein condensation. At that time this was viewed as a mathematical curiosity with little experimental interest, however. The peculiar properties of liquid Helium (?rst lique?ed by Kammerlingh Onnes in 1908) were eventually viewed as an experimental realization of Bose- Einstein statistics applied to Helium atoms. The unresolved mathematical pr- lem was that the atoms in liquid Helium are far from the kind of non-interacting particles envisaged in Einstein’s theory, and the question that needed to be - solved was whether Bose-Einstein condensation really takes place in a strongly interacting system — or even in a weakly interacting system. That question is still with us, three quarters of a century later! The ?rst systematic and semi-rigorous mathematical treatment of the pr- lem was due to Bogoliubov in 1947, but that theory, while intuitively appealing and undoubtedly correct in many aspects, has major gaps and some ?aws. The 1950’s and 1960’s brought a renewed ?urry of interest in the question, but while theoreticalintuitionbene?tedhugelyfromthisactivitythemathematicalstructure did not signi?cantly improve.