Directional differentiability of the rotation number for the almost- periodic Schrödinger equation (Q1196397)

Given the one-dimensional Schrödinger equation \(L_ E(x)\equiv- x''+g_ 0(t)x-Ex=0\), where \(g_ 0\) is an almost periodic potential, and \(A\) the set of energies for which the Lyapunov exponent vanishes, the paper deals with the variation of the rotation number on \(A\) and, in particular, with the differentiability and Lipschitz character of this map. The rotation number can be represented as an harmonic function on the upper half-plane, what constitutes the starting point of a theory developed by R. Johnson, S. Kotani, J. Moser and B. Simon among others. The rotation number has been seen to agree in its behavior on the real axis with the imaginary part of the extension to the real axis of a Herglotz function. The authors provide in the paper a new proof of these results and obtain some new ones. Their theory is based on the existence of a positive invariant measure which is absolutely continuous, and they make use of a map of Furstenberg type which transforms the flow on the projective bundle into a skew translation, preserving the rotation number. The idea is similar to the one used by Brunowski and Herman for families of diffeomorphisms of the circle. The authors start by characterizing through conditions the existence of the type of invariant measures they need (usually, square integrable density functions and continuous density functions are considered in applications); then, they specialize their results to the case of the linear Schrödinger equation and, finally, they address the main point of the directional differentiability of the rotation number, giving in the end some simple, explicit formulas.