Reviews in Mathematical Physics

In this paper, we construct metastable states of atoms interacting with the quantized radiation field. These states emerge from the excited bound states of the non-interacting system. We prove that these states obey an exponential time-decay law. In detail, we show that their decay is given by an exponential function in time, predicted by Fermi's Golden Rule, plus a small remainder term. The latter is proportional to the (4+β)th power of the coupling constant and decays algebraically in time. As a result, though it is small, it dominates the decay for large times. A central point of the paper is that our remainder term is significantly smaller than the one previously obtained in [1] and as a result we are able to show that the time interval during which the Fermi's Golden Rule can be observed is significantly longer that the time interval obtained in [1]. This improvement is achieved by incorporating a part of the complex dilatation resonance states into our construction of the metastable states rather than using the unperturbed eigenstates (the excited bound states of the non-interacting system). Thus, the connection to resonance states allows us to introduce metastable states which qualify better in the description of unstable excited states of the interacting system.

For the massless Dirac equation outside a slow Kerr black hole, we prove asymptotic completeness. We introduce a new Newman–Penrose tetrad in which the expression of the equation contains no artificial long-range perturbations. The main technique used is then a Mourre estimate. The geometry near the horizon requires us to apply a unitary transformation before we find ourselves in a situation where the generator of dilations is a good conjugate operator. The results are eventually re-interpreted geometrically to provide the solution to a Goursat problem on the Penrose compactified exterior.

We show that one can define (p,∞)-summable spectral triples using degenerate metrics on smooth manifolds. Furthermore, these triples satisfy Connes–Moscovici's discrete and finite dimension spectrum hypothesis, allowing one to use the Local Index Theorem [1] to compute the pairing with K-theory. We demonstrate this with a concrete example.