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Lecture

Calculus of Variations: Ground States in Quantum Mechanics

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MATH-604: Some Aspects of Calculus of Variations

The goal of this course is to present an overview on the solvability and the regularity of relevant models of physical, technological and economical systems, which may be formulated as minimization problems of suitable integral functionals. ...

Description

This lecture covers topics related to the Calculus of Variations, focusing on finding ground states in quantum mechanics by minimizing energy. It discusses the Euler Lagrange equation, Lagrange multipliers, and the stationary Schrödinger equation. The lecture introduces an abstract tool by Laurence Young and explores weak convergence of functions. It emphasizes the need for functions to be uniformly bounded and equi-integrable to approximate step functions. The lecture concludes with the Fundamental Theorem of Young Measure Theory.

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Mathematics

Topology: General topology

Related concepts (32)

Calculus of variations

The calculus of variations (or variational calculus) is a field of mathematical analysis that uses variations, which are small changes in functions and functionals, to find maxima and minima of functionals: mappings from a set of functions to the real numbers. Functionals are often expressed as definite integrals involving functions and their derivatives. Functions that maximize or minimize functionals may be found using the Euler–Lagrange equation of the calculus of variations.

Calculus

Calculus is the mathematical study of continuous change, in the same way that geometry is the study of shape, and algebra is the study of generalizations of arithmetic operations. It has two major branches, differential calculus and integral calculus; the former concerns instantaneous rates of change, and the slopes of curves, while the latter concerns accumulation of quantities, and areas under or between curves.

Direct method in the calculus of variations

In mathematics, the direct method in the calculus of variations is a general method for constructing a proof of the existence of a minimizer for a given functional, introduced by Stanisław Zaremba and David Hilbert around 1900. The method relies on methods of functional analysis and topology. As well as being used to prove the existence of a solution, direct methods may be used to compute the solution to desired accuracy. The calculus of variations deals with functionals , where is some function space and .

Uniform continuity

In mathematics, a real function of real numbers is said to be uniformly continuous if there is a positive real number such that function values over any function domain interval of the size are as close to each other as we want. In other words, for a uniformly continuous real function of real numbers, if we want function value differences to be less than any positive real number , then there is a positive real number such that at any and in any function interval of the size .

Totally bounded space

In topology and related branches of mathematics, total-boundedness is a generalization of compactness for circumstances in which a set is not necessarily closed. A totally bounded set can be covered by finitely many subsets of every fixed “size” (where the meaning of “size” depends on the structure of the ambient space). The term precompact (or pre-compact) is sometimes used with the same meaning, but precompact is also used to mean relatively compact. These definitions coincide for subsets of a complete metric space, but not in general.

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