The spectral shift function for compactly supported perturbations of Schrödinger operators on large bounded domains

We study the asymptotic behavior as L \to \infty of the finite-volume spectral shift function for a positive, compactly-supported perturbation of a Schrödinger operator in d-dimensional Euclidean space, restricted to a cube of side length L with Dirichlet boundary conditions. The size of the support of the perturbation is fixed and independent of L. We prove that the Cesàro mean of finite-volume spectral shift functions remains pointwise bounded along certain sequences L_n \to \infty for Lebesgue-almost every energy. In deriving this result, we give a short proof of the vague convergence of the finite-volume spectral shift functions to the infinite-volume spectral shift function as L \to\infty . Our findings complement earlier results of W. Kirsch [Proc. Amer. Math. Soc. 101, 509 - 512 (1987), Int. Eqns. Op. Th. 12, 383 - 391 (1989)] who gave examples of positive, compactly-supported perturbations of finite-volume Dirichlet Laplacians for which the pointwise limit of the spectral shift function does not exist for any given positive energy. Our methods also provide a new proof of the Birman--Solomyak formula for the spectral shift function that may be used to express the measure given by the infinite-volume spectral shift function directly in terms of the potential.

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