The bulk of known results in spectral and scattering theory for Schrodinger operators has been derived by time-independent (also called stationary) methods, which make extensive use of re solvent estimates and the spectral theorem. In very recent years there has been a partial shift of emphasis from the time-indepen dent to the time-dependent theory, due to the discovery of new, essentially time-dependent proofs of a fair number of the principal results such as asymptotic completeness, absence of singularly con tinuous spectrum and properties of scattering cross sections. These new...

The relevance of commutator methods in spectral and scattering theory has been known for a long time, and numerous interesting results have been ob tained by such methods. The reader may find a description and references in the books by Putnam Pu], Reed-Simon RS] and Baumgartel-Wollenberg BW] for example. A new point of view emerged around 1979 with the work of E. Mourre in which the method of locally conjugate operators was introduced. His idea proved to be remarkably fruitful in establishing detailed spectral properties of N-body Hamiltonians. A problem that was considered extremely...

The conjugate operator method is a powerful recently developed technique for studying spectral properties of self-adjoint operators. One of the purposes of this volume is to present a refinement of the original method due to Mourre leading to essentially optimal results in situations as varied as ordinary differential operators, pseudo-differential operators and N-body Schrodinger hamiltonians. Another topic is a new algebraic framework for the N-body problem allowing a simple and systematic treatment of large classes of many-channel hamiltonians. The monograph will be of interest to research...