Eigenvalue upper bounds for the magnetic Schroedinger operator

Abstract: We study the eigenvalues of the magnetic Schroedinger operator associated with a magnetic potential A and a scalar potential q, on a compact Riemannian manifold M, with Neumann boundary conditions if the boundary is not empty. We obtain several bounds for the spectrum. Besides the dimension and the volume of the manifold, the geometric quantity which plays an important role in these estimates is the first eigenvalue of the Hodge-de Rham Laplacian acting on co-exact 1-forms. In the 2-dimensional case, this is nothing but the first positive eigenvalue of the Laplacian acting on functions. As for the dependence of the bounds on the potentials, it brings into play the mean value of the scalar potential q, the L^2-norm of the magnetic field B=dA, and the distance, taken in L^2, between the harmonic component of A and the subspace of all closed 1-forms whose cohomology class is integral (that is, having integral flux around any loop). In particular, this distance is zero when the first cohomology group is trivial.