English

An uncertainty principle on compact manifolds

Classical Analysis and ODEs 2014-11-06 v1

Abstract

Breitenberger's uncertainty principle on the torus T\mathbb{T} and its higher-dimensional analogue on Sd1\mathbb{S}^{d-1} are well understood. We give describe an entire family of uncertainty principles on compact manifolds (M,g)(M,g), which includes the classical Heisenberg-Weyl uncertainty principle (for M=B(0,1)RdM=B(0,1) \subset \mathbb{R}^d the unit ball with the flat metric) and the Goh-Goodman uncertainty principle (for M=Sd1M=\mathbb{S}^{d-1} with the canonical metric) as special cases. This raises a new geometric problem related to small-curvature low-distortion embeddings: given a function f:MRf:M \rightarrow \mathbb{R}, which uncertainty principle in our family yields the best result? We give a (far from optimal) answer for the torus, discuss disconnected manifolds and state a variety of other open problems.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1411.1383,
  title  = {An uncertainty principle on compact manifolds},
  author = {Stefan Steinerberger},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1411.1383},
  year   = {2014}
}

Comments

17 pages, 8 figures, to appear in The Journal of Fourier Analysis and Applications

R2 v1 2026-06-22T06:49:22.146Z