Spectral Flow for the Riemann zeros

Abstract

Recently, with Mussardo we defined a quantum mechanical problem of a single particle scattering with impurities wherein the quantized energy levels $E_n (σ)$ are exactly equal to the zeros of the Riemann $ζ(s)$ where $σ= \Re (s)$ in the limit $σ\to 1/2$. The S-matrix is based on the Euler product and is unitary by construction, thus the underlying hamiltonian is hermitian and all eigenvalues must be real. Motivated by the Hilbert-Pólya idea we study the spectral flows for $\{ E_n (σ) \}$. This leads to a simple criterion for the validity of the Riemann Hypothesis. The spectral flow arguments are simple enough that we present analogous results for the Generalized and Grand Riemann Hypotheses. We also illustrate our results for a counter example where the Riemann Hypothesis is violated since there is no underlying unitary S-matrix due to the lack of an Euler product.