Homogeneous spectrum of quasi-periodic Gevrey Schrödinger operators with Diophantine frequency (Q6043600)

The authors study the operator \(H(x,\omega ,V)\) on \(l_2(\mathbb{Z})\) defined by \[ (H(x, \omega , V )\phi ) (n) = \phi (n + 1) + \phi (n - 1) + V (x + n\omega )\phi (n), \ n \in \mathbb{Z}, \] where \(x\in \mathbb{T}\), \(\omega \) is an irrational number and \(V:\mathbb{T}\to \mathbb{R} \) is real-valued. Quasi-periodic Schrödinger operators of this type occur frequently in quantum physics. It was shown in [\textit{A. Avila} and \textit{S. Jitomirskaya}, Ann. Math. (2) 170, No. 1, 303--342 (2009; Zbl 1166.47031)] that for \(V(t)=2\lambda \cos(2\pi t)\), the spectrum \(\mathcal{S}_\omega \) of \(H(x,\omega ,V)\) is a Cantor set. In this paper, a related property of the spectrum for more general \(V\) is obtained. Here the notion ``homogeneous'' for a closed set \(\mathcal{S}\subset \mathbb{R}\) means that there is \(\tau >0\) such that \(|\mathcal{S}\cap(E-\sigma ,E+\sigma )|\ge \tau \sigma \) whenever \(E\in \mathcal{S}\) and \(0\le\sigma \le\mbox{diam}(\mathcal{S})\). A \(C^\infty \) function \(V\) is said to belong to the Gevrey class \(\mathcal{G}^s (\mathbb{T})\) for some \(s > 1\) if there is a constant \(K>0\) such that \[\sup\limits _{x\in\mathbb{T}}|\partial ^m V (x)| \le K^m (m!)^s\] for all \(m \ge 0\). Define \[\|V\|_{s,K}=\dfrac13\sup\limits_{m} (1 + |m|)^2K^{-m} (m!)^{-s} \|\partial ^mV\| _{C ^0(\mathbb{T})} \] and \[G^{s,K} (\mathbb{S}^1 ) = \{V \in C^\infty (\mathbb{T}, \mathbb{R}):\|V \|_{s,K} < \infty \}.\] A function \(v \in \mathcal{G} ^{s,K}\) is called nondegenerate if for all \(x \in \mathbb{T}\) there is a natural number \(m\) such that \(v^{ (m)} (x) \ne 0\). The main result is the following: Theorem. Let \(\omega\) be a strong Diophantine frequency and let \(V = \lambda v\) with \(v \in \mathcal{G}^{s,K}\) being non-degenerate. Then there exists a constant \(\lambda _0\) such that for any \(\lambda >\lambda _0\), the spectrum \(\mathcal{S}_\omega \) of \(H(x, \omega , V )\) is homogeneous.