We investigate an electron in the plane interacting with the magnetic field due to an electric current forming a localized rotationally symmetric vortex. We show that independently of the vortex profile an electron with spin antiparallel to the magnetic field can be trapped if the vortex current is strong enough. In addition, the electron scattering on the vortex exhibits resonances for any spin orientation. On the other hand, in distinction to models with a localized flux tube this situation exhibits no bound states for weak vortices.

Quantum graphs attracted a lot of interest recently. There are several reasons for that. On one hand these models are useful as descriptions of various structures prepared from semiconductor wires, carbon nanotubes, and other substances. On the other hand they provide a tool to study properties of quantum dynamics in situations when the system has a nontrivial geometrical or topological structure. Quantum graph models contain typically free parameters related to coupling of the wave functions at the graph vertices, and to get full grasp of the theory one has to understand their physical meaning. A natural approach to this question is to investigate fat graphs, that is, systems of thin tubes built over the skeleton of a given graph, and to analyze its limit as the tube thickness tends to zero.

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The paper is devoted to a model of a mesoscopic system consisting of a pair of parallel planar waveguides separated by an infinitely thin semitransparent boundary modeled by a transverse interaction. We develop the BirmanSchwinger theory for the corresponding generalized Schrdinger operator. The spectral properties become nontrivial if the barrier coupling is not invariant with respect to longitudinal translations, in particular, there are bound states if the barrier is locally more transparent in the mean and the coupling parameter reaches the same asymptotic value in both directions along the guide axis. We derive the weak-coupling expansion of the ground-state eigenvalue for the cases when the perturbation is small in the supremum and the <b>L</b>¹-norms. The last named result applies to the situation when the support of the leaky part shrinks: the obtained asymptotics differs from that of a double guide divided

We study approximations of billiard systems by lattice graphs. It is demonstrated that under natural assumptions the graph wavefunctions approximate solutions of the Schroedinger equation with energy rescaled by the billiard dimension. As an example, we analyze a Sinai billiard with attached leads. The results illustrate emergence of global structures in large quantum graphs and offer interesting comparisons with patterns observed in complex networks of a different nature.