  Devices exhibiting the integer quantum Hall effect can be modeled by
one-electron Schroedinger operators describing the planar motion of an electron
in a perpendicular, constant magnetic field, and under the influence of an
electrostatic potential. The electron motion is confined to unbounded subsets
of the plane by confining potential barriers. The edges of the confining
potential barrier create edge currents. In this, the first of two papers, we
prove explicit lower bounds on the edge currents associated with one-edge,
unbounded geometries formed by various confining potentials. This work extends
some known results that we review. The edge currents are carried by states with
energy localized between any two Landau levels. These one-edge geometries
describe the electron confined to certain unbounded regions in the plane
obtained by deforming half-plane regions. We prove that the currents are stable
under various potential perturbations, provided the perturbations are suitably
small relative to the magnetic field strength, including perturbations by
random potentials. For these cases of one-edge geometries, the existence of,
and the estimates on, the edge currents imply that the corresponding
Hamiltonian has intervals of absolutely continuous spectrum. In the second
paper of this series, we consider the edge currents associated with two-edge
geometries describing bounded, cylinder-like regions, and unbounded,
strip-like, regions.
