Dirichlet Laplacian on curved tubes of a constant cross section in two and three dimensions is investigated. It is shown that if the tube is non-straight and its curvature vanishes asymptotically, there is always a bound state below the bottom of the essential spectrum. An upper bound to the number of these bound states in thin tubes is derived. Furthermore, if the tube is only slightly bent, there is just one bound state; we derive its behaviour with respect to the bending angle. Finally, perturbation theory of these eigenvalues in any thin tube with respect to the tube radius is constructed and some open questions are formulated.

We consider a nonrelativistic quantum particle constrained to a curved layer of constant width built over a non-compact surface embedded in $R^3$. We suppose that the latter is endowed with the geodesic polar coordinates and that the layer has the hard-wall boundary. Under the assumption that the surface curvatures vanish at infinity we find sufficient conditions which guarantee the existence of geometrically induced bound states.Comment: 20 pages in LaTe

The Dirichlet Laplacian in curved tubes of arbitrary cross-section rotating w.r.t. the Tang frame along infinite curves in Euclidean spaces of arbitrary dimension is investigated. If the reference curve is not straight and its curvatures vanish at infinity, we prove that the essential spectrum as a set coincides with the spectrum of the straight tube of the same cross-section and that the discrete spectrum is not empty. MSC2000: 81Q10; 58J50; 53A04.