Solution

ID: past-exam-of-the-mathematics-course-of-the-university-of-cambridge/2014/iii/paper-63/4/a/i/solution

Use the Fourier transform convention . Since , it is real, so . The positive-frequency cutoff therefore also eliminates frequencies at or below . Normalization gives .
For spectral filtering of Hamiltonian terms, choose
In an energy eigenbasis, its matrix elements are
At the frequency is zero, so the normalization preserves the ground-state expectation:
The spectral filter is a positive weighted average of unitary conjugations; in particular the integral is bounded in operator norm by . We can choose it even without an extra assumed tail bound: the evenization of a nonnegative bandlimited filter proved in part (e) produces another admissible spectral filter with the same type of positive-time decay. Make that choice consistently in all the filtered terms and shell definitions below.

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