Lifshitz tails for random perturbations of periodic Schrödinger operators (Q1599747)

The author reviews Lifshitz tails for random perturbations of periodic Schrödinger operators. It is concentrated on a single model, the continuous Anderson model rather than the whole literature on Lifshitz tails. In 1963, Lifshitz produced a heuristic showing that, at the fluctuational band edges of the spectrum of a random Schrödinger operator, the density of states decays exponentially fast. This differs dramatically from the behavior of the density of states of a periodic Schrödinger operator: in this case, the band edge decay is polynomial. One of the major consequences of this difference is that the band edge spectral behaviors for these two classes of operators are radically different: in the random case, the spectrum is localized and, in the periodic case, the spectrum is extended. Indeed Lifshitz tails play a crucial role in the proof of band-edge localization.