Schrodinger operators with strongly singular interactions, typically supported by a set of Lebesgue measure zero, eg, by a nite or countable set of points, appeared in quantum mechanics from the very beginning~cf., eg,[35, 28]. Their use had essentially two motivations. First of all, they were expected to provide a reasonable description in the physical situations when the real interaction has a very small range comparing to the other characteristic lengths of the problem, for instance, to the wavelength of the scattered particles. On the other hand, the fact that the interaction support is small and outside it a free solution of the corresponding Schrodinger equation may be used often makes such models explicitly solvable. Until the beginning of the sixties, however, the occasional use of these point interactions remained purely formal. Only after the work of Berezin and Faddeev [11] did it become clear they can be

Consider an unstable quantum system that has been found undecayed at an instant s and denote by R(t,s) the rate of its regeneration into an original (undecayed) state at a later instant t+s. It is proved that the reduced evolution is a semigroup, i.e., there is no regeneration at all, provided R(t,s)1/2 can be estimated by a sufficiently regular function that is nondecreasing in s and has zero derivative with respect to t at t=0 for every s. This generalizes the theorem of Misra and Sinha [Helv. Phys. Acta 45, 619 (1972)] in a different direction than in a recent paper by Nishioka [J. Math. Phys. 29, 1860 (1988)].

The Feynman maps introduced first by Truman are examined. The domain considered here consists of the Fresnel-integrable functions in the sense of Albeverio and Hoegh-Krohn; extensions to wider classes of functions will be studied in the following paper. The original definition of the F-maps is slightly modified: we start from the underlying measures on the Hilbert space of paths in order to avoid use of improper integrals. Some new properties of the F-maps are derived. In particular, the dominated convergence theorem is shown to be not valid for the F₁-map (or Feynman integral); this fact is of a certain importance for the classical limit of quantum mechanics.

We consider a charged spinless quantum particle confined to a graph consisting of a loop to which a halfline lead is attached; this system is placed into a homogeneous magnetic field perpendicular to the loop plane. We derive the reflection amplitude and show that there is an infinite ladder of resonances; analyzing the resonance pole trajectories, we show that half of them turn into true embedded eigenvalues provided the flux through the loop is an integer or half-integer multiple of the flux unit hc/e. We also describe a general method to solve the scattering problem on graphs of which the present model is a simple particular case. Finally, we discuss ways in which a state localized initially at the loop decays.

The notion of a vector space is obtained by axiomatization of the properties of the threedimensional space of Euclidean geometry, or of configuration spaces of classical mechanics. A vector (or linear) space V is a set {x, y,...} equipped with the operations of summation,[x, y] x+ y V, and multiplication by a complex or real number ,[, x] x V, such that (i) The summation is commutative, x+ y= y+ x, and associative,(x+ y)+ z= x+(y+ z). There exist a zero element 0 V, and an inverse element x V, to any x V so that x+ 0= x and x+( x)= 0 holds for all x V.(ii) (x)=() x and 1x= x.(iii) The summation and multiplication are distributive, (x+ y)= x+ y and (+ ) x= x+ x.