Absolutely continuous spectrum of perturbed Stark operators

We prove new results on the stability of the absolutely cont;inuous spectrum for perturbed Stark operators with decaying or satisfying certain smoothness assumption perturbation. We show that the absolutely continuous spectrum of the Stark operator is stable if the perturbing potential decays at the rate (1 + x) 3 -e or if it is continuously differentiable with derivative from the H6lder space C, (R), with any ae > 0. 0. INTRODUCTION In this paper, we study the stability of the absolutely continuous spect;rum of one-dimensional Stark operators under various classes of perturbations. Stark Schr6dinger operators describe behavior of the charged particle in the constant electric field. The absolutely continuous spectrum is a manifestation of the fact that the particle described by the operator propagates to infinity at a rather fast rate (see, e.g. [2], [12]). It is therefore interesting to describe the classes of perturbations which preserve the absolutely continuous spectrum of the Stark operators. In the first part of this work, we study perturbations of Stark operators by decaying potentials. This part is inspired by the recent work of Naboko and Pushnitski [14]. The general picture that we prove is very similar to the case of perturbatiorns of free Schr6dinger operators [9]. In accordance with physical intuition, however, the absolutely continuous spectrum is stable under stronger perturbations than in the free case. If in the free case the short range potentials preserving purely absolutely continuous spectrum of the free operator are given by condition (on the power scale) lq(x)l < C(1 + xKl)'E, in the Stark operator case the corresponding condition reads lq(x)l < C(1 + IXD)-2-E. If c is allowed to be zero in the above bounds, imbedded eigenvalues may occur in both cases (see, e.g. [14], [151). Moreover, in both cases if we allow potential to decay slower by an arbitrary function growing to infinity, very rich singular spectrum, such as a dense set of eigenvalues, -may occur (see [13] for the free case and [141 for the Stark case for precise formulation and proofs of these results). The first part of this work draws the parallel further, showing that the absolutely continuous spectrum of Stark operators is preserved under perturbations satisfying lq(x)l < C(1 + Jxl)-3-E, in particular even in the regimes where a dense set of eigenvalues occurs; hence in such cases these eigenvalues are genuinely imbedded. Similar results for the free case were proven in [9], Received by the editors April 14, 1997. 1991 Mathematics Subject Classification. Primary 34L40, 81Q10. ?)1999 American Mathematical Society 243 This content downloaded from 207.46.13.156 on Sat, 10 Sep 2016 04:57:39 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 244 ALEXANDER KISELEV [10]. Our main strategy of the proof here is similar to that in [9] and [10]: we study the asymptotics of the generalized eigenfunctions and then apply Gilbert-Pearson theory [7] to derive spectral consequences. While the main new tool we introduce in our treatment of Stark operators is the same as in the free case, namely the a.e. convergence of the Fourier-type integral operators, there are some major differences. First of all, the spectral parameter enters the final equations that we study in a different way and this makes analysis more complicated. Secondly, we employ a different method to analyze the asymptotics. Instead of Harris-Lutz asymptotic method we study appropriate Prilfer transform variables, simplifying the overall consideration. In the second part of the work we discuss perturbations by potentials having some additional smoothness properties, but without decay. It turns out that for Stark operators the effects of decay or of additional smoothness of potential on the spectral properties are somewhat similar. It was known for a long time that if a potential perturbing Stark operator has two bounded derivatives the spectrum remains purely absolutely continuous (actually, certain growth of derivatives is also allowed, see Section 2 for details or Walter [21] for the original result). We note that the results similar to Walter's on the preservation of absolutely continuous spectrum were also obtained in [4] by applying different types of technique (Mourre method instead of studying asymptotics of solutions). On the other hand, if the perturbing potential is a sequence of derivatives of 6 functions in integer points on R with certain couplings, the spectrum may turn pure point [3], [5], [1]. In some sense, the 6' interaction is the most singular and least "differentiable" among all available natural perturbations of one-dimensional Schrbdinger operators [11]. Hence we have very different spectral properties on the very opposite sides of the smoothness scale. This work closes part of the gap. We improve the well-known results of Walter [21] concerning the minimal smoothness required for the preservation of the absolutely continuous spectrum and show that in fact existence and minimal smoothness of the first derivative is sufficient to imply absolute continuity of the spectrum. After submitting this paper, the author learned about the work of J. Sahbani [17], where, in particular, the results related to Theorem 2.1 of the present work are proven. Sahbani's results are slightly stronger than Theorem 2.1: the derivative of potential V'(x) is required to be bounded and Dini continuous in order for the absolutely continuous spectrum to be preserved. In addition, he shows that the imbedded singular spectrum in this case may only consist of isolated eigenvalues. The approach employed in [17] is an extension of conjugate operator method. 1. DECAYING PERTURBATIONS Consider a self-adjoint operator Hq defined by the differential expression Hqu =-u" -xu + q(x)u on the L2(-oo, oo). Let us introduce some notation. For the function f C L2 we denote by bf its Fourier transform: