Distorted plane waves in chaotic scattering

Abstract

We provide a precise description of distorted plane waves for semiclassical Schrödinger operators under the assumption that the classical trapped set is hyperbolic and that a certain topological pressure (a quantity defined using thermodynamical formalism) is negative. Distorted plane waves are generalized eigenfunctions of the Schrödinger operator which differ from free plane waves, $e^{i\langle x,\xi \rangle ∕h}$, by an outgoing term. Under our assumptions we show that they can be written as a convergent sum of Lagrangian states. That provides a description of their semiclassical defect measures in the spirit of quantum ergodicity and extends results of Guillarmou and Naud obtained for hyperbolic quotients to our setting.