On the Spectra of Separable 2D Almost Mathieu Operators

We consider separable 2D discrete Schrödinger operators generated by 1D almost Mathieu operators. For fixed Diophantine frequencies, we prove that for sufficiently small couplings the spectrum must be an interval. This complements a result by J. Bourgain establishing that for fixed couplings the spectrum has gaps for some (positive measure) Diophantine frequencies. Our result generalizes to separable multidimensional discrete Schrödinger operators generated by 1D quasiperiodic operators whose potential is analytic and whose frequency is Diophantine. The proof is based on the study of the thickness of the spectrum of the almost Mathieu operator and utilizes the Newhouse Gap Lemma on sums of Cantor sets.

Dilations of $q$-Commuting Unitaries

Let $q = e^{i \theta } \in \mathbb{T}$ (where $\theta \in \mathbb{R}$), and let $u,v$ be $q$-commuting unitaries, that is, $u$ and $v$ are unitaries such that $vu = quv$. In this paper, we find the optimal constant $c = c_{\theta }$ such that $u,v$ can be dilated to a pair of operators $c U, c V$, where $U$ and $V$ are commuting unitaries. We show that $$\begin{equation*} c_{\theta} = \frac{4}{\|u_{\theta}+u_{\theta}^*+v_{\theta}+v_{\theta}^*\|}, \end{equation*}$$where $u_{\theta }, v_{\theta }$ are the universal $q$-commuting pair of unitaries, and we give numerical estimates for the above quantity. In the course of our proof, we also consider dilating $q$-commuting unitaries to scalar multiples of $q^{\prime}$-commuting unitaries. The techniques that we develop allow us to give new and simple “dilation theoretic” proofs of well-known results regarding the continuity of the field of rotations algebras. In particular, for the so-called “almost Mathieu operator” $h_{\theta } = u_{\theta }+u_{\theta }^*+v_{\theta }+v_{\theta }^*$, we recover the fact that the norm $\|h_{\theta }\|$ is a Lipschitz continuous function of $\theta $, as well as the result that the spectrum $\sigma (h_{\theta })$ is a $\frac{1}{2}$-Hölder continuous function in $\theta $ with respect to the Hausdorff metric. In fact, we obtain this Hölder continuity of the spectrum for every self-adjoint *-polynomial $p(u_{\theta },v_{\theta })$, which in turn endows the rotation algebras with the natural structure of a continuous field of C*-algebras.

Almost Mathieu operators with completely resonant phases

Let $\unicode[STIX]{x1D6FC}\in \mathbb{R}\backslash \mathbb{Q}$ and $\unicode[STIX]{x1D6FD}(\unicode[STIX]{x1D6FC})=\limsup _{n\rightarrow \infty }(\ln q_{n+1})/q_{n}<\infty$, where $p_{n}/q_{n}$ is the continued fraction approximation to $\unicode[STIX]{x1D6FC}$. Let $(H_{\unicode[STIX]{x1D706},\unicode[STIX]{x1D6FC},\unicode[STIX]{x1D703}}u)(n)=u(n+1)+u(n-1)+2\unicode[STIX]{x1D706}\cos 2\unicode[STIX]{x1D70B}(\unicode[STIX]{x1D703}+n\unicode[STIX]{x1D6FC})u(n)$ be the almost Mathieu operator on $\ell ^{2}(\mathbb{Z})$, where $\unicode[STIX]{x1D706},\unicode[STIX]{x1D703}\in \mathbb{R}$. Avila and Jitomirskaya [The ten Martini problem. Ann. of Math. (2), 170(1) (2009), 303–342] conjectured that, for $2\unicode[STIX]{x1D703}\in \unicode[STIX]{x1D6FC}\mathbb{Z}+\mathbb{Z}$, $H_{\unicode[STIX]{x1D706},\unicode[STIX]{x1D6FC},\unicode[STIX]{x1D703}}$ satisfies Anderson localization if $|\unicode[STIX]{x1D706}|>e^{2\unicode[STIX]{x1D6FD}(\unicode[STIX]{x1D6FC})}$. In this paper, we develop a method to treat simultaneous frequency and phase resonances and obtain that, for $2\unicode[STIX]{x1D703}\in \unicode[STIX]{x1D6FC}\mathbb{Z}+\mathbb{Z}$, $H_{\unicode[STIX]{x1D706},\unicode[STIX]{x1D6FC},\unicode[STIX]{x1D703}}$ satisfies Anderson localization if $|\unicode[STIX]{x1D706}|>e^{3\unicode[STIX]{x1D6FD}(\unicode[STIX]{x1D6FC})}$.