A semiclassical analysis based on spin-coherent states is used to establish a classification and novel simple formulae for the spectral gap of mean-field spin Hamiltonians. For gapped systems, we provide a full description of the low-energy spectra based on a second-order approximation to the semiclassical Hamiltonian, hence justifying fluctuation theory at zero temperature for this case. We also point out a shift caused by the spherical geometry in these second-order approximations.

In this article, we study the observability (or equivalently, the controllability) of some subelliptic evolution equations depending on their step. This sheds light on the speed of propagation of these equations, notably in the ‘degenerated directions’ of the subelliptic structure.

First, for any $\gamma \geq 1$, we establish a resolvent estimate for the Baouendi–Grushin-type operator $\Delta _{\gamma }=\partial _x^2+\left \lvert x\right \rvert ^{2\gamma }\partial _y^2$, which has step $\gamma +1$. We then derive consequences for the observability of the Schrödinger-type equation $i\partial _tu-\left (-\Delta _{\gamma }\right )^{s}u=0$, where $s\in \mathbb N$. We identify three different cases: depending on the value of the ratio $(\gamma +1)/s$, observability may hold in arbitrarily small time or only for sufficiently large times or may even fail for any time.

As a corollary of our resolvent estimate, we also obtain observability for heat-type equations $\partial _tu+\left (-\Delta _{\gamma }\right )^su=0$ and establish a decay rate for the damped wave equation associated with $\Delta _{\gamma }$.

This paper is devoted to dimensional reductions via the norm-resolvent convergence. We derive explicit bounds on the resolvent difference as well as spectral asymptotics. The efficiency of our abstract tool is demonstrated by its application on seemingly different partial differential equation problems from various areas of mathematical physics; all are analysed in a unified manner, known results are recovered and new ones established.

A Lagrangian surface hopping algorithm is implemented to study the two dimensional massless Dirac equation for Graphene with an electrostatic potential, in the semiclassical regime. In this problem, the crossing of the energy levels of the system at Dirac points requires a particular treatment in the algorithm in order to describe the quantum transition—characterized by the Landau-Zener probability— between different energy levels. We first derive the Landau-Zener probability for the underlying problem, then incorporate it into the surface hopping algorithm. We also show that different asymptotic models for this problem derived in [O. Morandi, F. Schurrer, J. Phys. A:Math. Theor. 44 (2011) 265301]may give different transition probabilities. We conduct numerical experiments to compare the solutions to the Dirac equation, the surface hopping algorithm, and the asymptotic models of [O. Morandi, F. Schurrer, J. Phys. A: Math. Theor. 44 (2011) 265301].