Tal Malinovitch

My research focuses on Schrödinger operators, using scattering and spectral theory tools; I am also interested in periodic systems and, more specifically, twisted bilayer graphene. My recent projects revolve around twisted bilayer graphene and ballistic transport, as well as systems that are partially periodic.

I have recently completed a project offering a new approach to analyzing twisted bilayer graphene from first principles without telling on the famous Bistritzer-MacDonald model and its approximations. This work aims to lay the groundwork that will allow, later on, a more direct approach to the magic angles observed in these systems. In this work, I analyzed this system for commensurate angles- angles that still have periodic structure- and showed the existence of Dirac cones in the vertices of the Brillouin zone, and showed that the slope of the Dirac cones is small for commensurate angles that are close to incommensurate angles.

Before that, I had a collaboration studying ballistic transport in systems with potential that is periodic in some directions and compactly supported in others. We managed to show that a subset of the surface states in such a system exhibits directional ballistic transport, as well as that a dense subset of all scattering states exhibits ballistic transport in all directions.

My thesis revolves around systems where the potential decays only in some, but not all, directions. In collaboration with Adam Black, this work generalizes the usual setting of short-range scattering to various general geometries. By utilizing microlocal tools, we showed that for such operators, any function decomposes into two components that differ by their asymptotic behavior in time.

Before starting my graduate program, I worked for the Israeli Atomic Energy Commission as a researcher and later as head of the nuclear reactor physics group. My research required intimate knowledge of our reactor and a deep understanding of its physics. One of the projects I worked on, which later became my M.Sc. thesis, was to generalize the current noise experiments formalism to include energy and spatial dependencies.

In addition to my current research, I am also involved in an ongoing project with a doctor from Yale Medical School to develop a general mathematical framework for analyzing steady-state experiments for determining metabolic rates.

Publications

  1. Twisted bilayer graphene in commensurate angles, Preprint, September 2024.
  2. What is Ballistic Transport? Journal of Spectral Theory, 2024, with David Damanik and Giorgio Young.
  3. Directional Ballistic transport for partially periodic Schrödinger operators- Preprint, November 2023, with Adam Black, David Damanik, and Giorgio Young.
  4. Scattering for Schrödinger operators with conical decay- Preprint, October 2022, with Adam Black.
  5. A new formalism for analyzing metabolic rates in steady state experiments - in preparation, 2022, with Stephan Siebel.
  6. Scattering for Schrödinger operators with potentials concentrated near a subspace - Transactions of the American Mathematical Society 376 (2023), no. 4, 2525–2555, with Adam Black.
  7. A Multi-region Multi-energy Formalism for the Feynman-alpha Formulas - Annals of Nuclear energy, October 2014, With Chen Dubi

Invited Talks