Publications [#343709] of Jianfeng Lu

Papers Published

1. Lu, J; Sogge, CD; Steinerberger, S, Approximating pointwise products of Laplacian eigenfunctions, Journal of Functional Analysis, vol. 277 no. 9 (November, 2019), pp. 3271-3282 [doi]
   (last updated on 2026/01/14)

   Abstract:
   We consider Laplacian eigenfunctions on a d-dimensional bounded domain M (or a d-dimensional compact manifold M) with Dirichlet conditions. These operators give rise to a sequence of eigenfunctions (eℓ)ℓ∈N. We study the subspace of all pointwise products An=span{ei(x)ej(x):1≤i,j≤n}⊆L²(M). Clearly, that vector space has dimension dim(An)=n(n+1)/2. We prove that products eiej of eigenfunctions are simple in a certain sense: for any ε>0, there exists a low-dimensional vector space Bn that almost contains all products. More precisely, denoting the orthogonal projection ΠBn :L²(M)→Bn, we have ∀1≤i,j≤n‖eiej−ΠBn (eiej)‖L² ≤ε and the size of the space dim(Bn) is relatively small: for every δ>0, dim(Bn)≲M,δε^−δn^1+δ. We obtain the same sort of bounds for products of arbitrary length, as well for approximation in H⁻¹ norm. Pointwise products of eigenfunctions are low-rank. This has implications, among other things, for the validity of fast algorithms in electronic structure computations.