Truncated Infinitesimal Shifts, Spectral Operators and Quantized Universality of the Riemann Zeta Function

Abstract

We survey some of the universality properties of the Riemann zeta function ζ(s) and then explain how to obtain a natural quantization of Voronin’s universality theorem (and of its various extensions). Our work builds on the theory of complex fractal dimensions for fractal strings developed by the second author and M. van Frankenhuijsen in [60]. It also makes an essential use of the functional analytic framework developed by the authors in [25] for rigorously studying the spectral operator 𝔞 (mapping the geometry onto the spectrum of generalized fractal strings), and the associated infinitesimal shift ∂ of the real line: 𝔞=ζ(∂), in the sense of the functional calculus. In the quantization (or operator-valued) version of the universality theorem for the Riemann zeta function ζ(s) proposed here, the role played by the complex variable s in the classical universality theorem is now played by the family of ‘truncated infinitesimal shifts’ introduced in [25] in order to study the invertibility of the spectral operator in connection with a spectral reformulation of the Riemann hypothesis as an inverse spectral problem for fractal strings. This latter work provided an operator-theoretic version of the spectral reformulation obtained by the second author and H. Maier in [50]. In the long term, our work (along with [42, 43]), is aimed in part at providing a natural quantization of various aspects of analytic number theory and arithmetic geometry.