Optimal semiclassical regularity of projection operators and strong Weyl law

Abstract

Projection operators arise naturally as one-particle density operators associated to Slater determinants in fields such as quantum mechanics and the study of determinantal processes. In the context of the semiclassical approximation of quantum mechanics, projection operators can be seen as the analogue of characteristic functions of subsets of the phase space, which are discontinuous functions. We prove that projection operators indeed converge to characteristic functions of the phase space and that in terms of quantum Sobolev spaces, they exhibit the same maximal regularity as characteristic functions. This can be interpreted as a semiclassical asymptotic on the size of commutators in Schatten norms. Our study answers a question raised in Chong et al. [J. Eur. Math. Soc. (unpublished) (2024)] about the possibility of having projection operators as initial data. It also gives a strong convergence result in Sobolev spaces for the Weyl law in phase space.