Spectral Theory and Mathematical Physics: A Festschrift in Honor of Barry Simon's 60th Birthday: Quantum Field Theory, Statistical Mechanics, and ... (Proceedings of Symposia in Pure Mathematics)

This Festschrift had its origins in a conference called SimonFest held at Caltech, March 27-31, 2006, to honor Barry Simon's 60th birthday. It is not a proceedings volume in the usual sense since the emphasis of the majority of the contributions is on reviews of the state of the art of certain fields, with particular focus on recent developments and open problems. The bulk of the articles in this Festschrift are of this survey form, and a few review Simon's contributions to a particular area. Part 1 contains surveys in the areas of Quantum Field Theory, Statistical Mechanics, Nonrelativistic Two-Body and $N$-Body Quantum Systems, Resonances, Quantum Mechanics with Electric and Magnetic Fields, and the Semiclassical Limit. Part 2 contains surveys in the areas of Random and Ergodic Schrödinger Operators, Singular Continuous Spectrum, Orthogonal Polynomials, and Inverse Spectral Theory. In several cases, this collection of surveys portrays both the history of a subject and its current state of the art. Exhaustive lists of references enhance the presentation offered in these surveys. A substantial part of the contributions to this Festschrift are survey articles on the state of the art of certain areas with special emphasis on open problems. This will benefit graduate students as well as researchers who want to get a quick, yet comprehensive introduction into an area covered in this volume.