Almost periodic Jacobi matrices with homogeneous spectrum, infinite dimensional Jacobi inversion, and Hardy spaces of character-automorphic functions (Q1298380)

In the early 1960s, N.~I.~Akhiezer introduced a natural class of spectral measures of real potentials with finite-band spectra. He found that these potentials are Abelian functions on an appropriate hyperelliptic Riemann surface. The core of his approach was a reduction of the inverse problem for such potentials to the Jacobi inversion problem. In fact, Akhiezer considered only operators acting on the semi-axis (\(\mathbb R^+\) or \(\mathbb Z^+\)) but, in essence, his class contains spectral measures of all so called finite-band potentials. The authors add a portion of theory of Hardy classes in infinitely connected domains in the spirit of H.~Widom, Ch. Pommerenke, M. Hasumi, and P.~Jones and D.~Marshall to the circle of these ideas. The main aim of the present paper is to extend Akhiezer's ideas to the case when the spectrum of a self-adjoint difference/differential operator of the second order is a Cantor set of positive Lebesgue measure, and to establish an infinite dimensional real version of the Jacobi inversion problem. In the considered case, generically, there is no hyperelliptic Riemann surface associated with the spectral problem, and the group of unimodular characters of the fundamental group of the resolvent set (which is a torus isomorphic to the real part of the Jacobi variety when the latter exists in the classical sense) plays the role of an isospectral manifold of operators. Just as in the classical finite-band case, the generalized Abel map conjugates the nonlinear evolution of spectral data with a linear motion on this torus. In particular, the considered operators turn out to be uniformly almost-periodic. The main tool is a theory of character-automorphic functions with respect to the Fuchsian group uniformizing the infinitely connected resolvent domain of the operator. Some of the results relating to character-automorphic functions probably have an independent interest. In particular, for Widom type groups, the natural generalization of the Fourier basis is found, and for Widom-Carleson type groups, the orthogonal complement to holomorphic character-automorphic functions from the Hardy space \(H^2\) is characterized. The results of the presnt paper have been announced in Russ. Acad. Sci., Dokl., Math. 49, 364-368 (1994); translation from Dokl. Akad. Nauk, Ross. Akad. Nauk 335, 433-436 (1994; Zbl 0857.47021).