Absolutely continuous spectrum for Laplacians on radial metric trees and periodicity (Q1686846)

The potentialless Laplacian is considered on a radially symmetric tree with an infinite number of generations and finite length edges at most finitely many of which are 1 and infimum strictly positive. Under various assumptions on the parameters of the interface conditions at each generation, it is shown that the absolutely continuous spectrum of the associated differential operator, in \(L^2\) over the tree, is non-empty only if the sequence of interface condition parameters and edge lengths, index by generation, is eventually periodic, i.e. is periodic beyond some index.