We prove a quantum Sabine law for the location of resonances in transmission problems. In this talk, our main applications are to scattering by strictly convex, smooth, transparent obstacles and highly frequency dependent delta potentials. In each case, we give a sharp characterization of the resonance free regions in terms of dynamical quantities. In particular, we relate the imaginary part of resonances to the chord lengths and reflectivity coefficients for the ray dynamics and hence give a quantum version of the Sabine law from acoustics.[-]

Polyakov's formula expresses a difference of zeta-regularized determinants of Laplace operators, an anomaly of global quantities, in terms of simple local quantities. Such a formula is well known in the case of closed surfaces (Osgood, Philips, & Sarnak 1988) and surfaces with smooth boundary (Alvarez 1983). Due to the abstract nature of the definition of the zeta-regularized determinant of the Laplacian, it is typically impossible to compute an explicit formula. Nonetheless, Kokotov (genus one Kokotov & Klochko 2007, arbitrary genus Kokotov 2013) demonstrated such a formula for polyhedral surfaces ! I will discuss joint work with Clara Aldana concerning the zeta regularized determinant of the Laplacian on Euclidean domains with corners. We determine a Polyakov formula which expresses the dependence of the determinant on the opening angle at a corner. Our ultimate goal is to determine an explicit formula, in the spirit of Kokotov's results, for the determinant on polygonal domains.[-]

I will describe joint work with Dietrich Häfner and Andràs Vasy in which we study the asymptotic behavior of linearized gravitational perturbations of Schwarzschild or slowly rotating Kerr black hole spacetimes. We show that solutions of the linearized Einstein equation decay at an inverse polynomial rate to a stationary solution (given by an infinitesimal variation of the mass and angular momentum of the black hole), plus a pure gauge term. Our proof uses a detailed description of the resolvent of an associated wave equation on symmetric 2-tensors near zero energy.[-]

In the 80's, D. Ruelle, D. Bowen and others have introduced probabilistic and spectral methods in order to study deterministic chaos (”Ruelle resonances”). For a geodesic flow on a strictly negative curvature Riemannian manifold, following this approach and use of microlocal analysis, one obtains that long time fluctuations of classical probabilities are described by an effective quantum wave equation. This may be surprising because there is no added quantization procedure. We will discuss consequences for the zeros of dynamical zeta functions. This shows that the problematic of classical chaos and quantum chaos are closely related. Joint work with Masato Tsujii.[-]

In this talk we will discuss a new geodesic beam approach to understanding eigenfunction concentration. We characterize the features that cause an eigenfunction to saturate the standard supremum bounds in terms of the distribution of $L^{2}$ mass along geodesic tubes emanating from a point. We also show that the phenomena behind extreme supremum norm growth is identical to that underlying extreme growth of eigenfunctions when averaged along submanifolds. Using the description of concentration, we obtain quantitative improvements on the known bounds in a wide variety of settings.[-]