The most general admissible boundary conditions are derived for an idealized AharonovBohm flux intersecting the plane at the origin on the background of a homogeneous magnetic field. A standard technique based on self-adjoint extensions yields a four-parameter family of boundary conditions; the other two parameters of the model are the AharonovBohm flux and the homogeneous magnetic field. The generalized boundary conditions may be regarded as a combination of the AharonovBohm effect with a point interaction. Spectral properties of the derived Hamtonians are studied in detail.

We discuss the Nckel model of an open quantum dot, i.e. a straight hard-wall channel with a potential well. If this potential depends on the longitudinal variable only, there are embedded eigenvalues which turn into resonances if the symmetry is violated, either by applying a magnetic field or by deformation of the well. For a weak symmetry breaking we derive the perturbative expansion of these resonances. We also deduce a sufficient condition under which the discrete spectrum of such a system (without any symmetry) survives the presence of a strong magnetic field. It is satisfied, in particular, if the dot potential is purely attractive.

We study transport in quantum systems consisting of a finite array of N identical single-channel scatterers. A general expression of the S matrix in terms of the individual-element data obtained recently for potential scattering is rederived in this wider context. It shows in particular how the band spectrum of the infinite periodic system arises in the limit N. We illustrate the result on two kinds of examples. The first are serial graphs obtained by chaining loops or T-junctions. Another example concerns geometric scatterers where the individual element consists of a surface with a pair of leads; we show that apart from the resonances coming from the decoupled-surface eigenvalues, such scatterers exhibit the high-energy behavior typical for the interaction for the physically interesting couplings.

We consider a class of Hamiltonians in L2(R2) with attractive interaction supported by piecewise C2 smooth loops of a fixed length L, formally given by (x) with >0. It is shown that the ground state of this operator is locally maximized by a circular . We also conjecture that this property holds globally and show that the problem is related to an interesting family of geometric inequalities concerning mean values of chords of .

We consider the Laplacian in curved tubes of arbitrary crosssection rotating together with the Frenet frame along curves in Euclidean spaces of arbitrary dimension, subject to Dirichlet boundary conditions on the cylindrical surface and Neumann conditions at the ends of the tube. We prove that the spectral threshold of the Laplacian is estimated from below by the lowest eigenvalue of the Dirichlet Laplacian in a torus determined by the geometry of the tube.