Green's function asymptotics of periodic elliptic operators on abelian coverings of compact manifolds (Q1677450)

If \(L\) is a second-order elliptic operator in \(\mathbb{R}^d\) with a periodic potential satisfying the right structural assumptions, then, as is well known in the mathematical physics community, its spectrum, which up to a shift lies on the positive half-axis, has a band-gap structure. In the papers [\textit{P. Kuchment} and \textit{A. Raich}, Math. Nachr. 285, No. 14--15, 1880--1894 (2012; Zbl 1257.35080)] and [\textit{M. Kha} et al., J. Spectr. Theory 7, No. 4, 1171--1233 (2017; Zbl 1394.35297)], the respective authors investigated the behaviour of the Green's function \(G_\lambda\) (convolution kernel of the resolvent) of \(L\) for \(\lambda\) near the edges of these spectral bands. In particular, under a number of technical assumptions including a certain ``genericity'' of the potential, for such \(\lambda\) they established the asymptotic behaviour of \(G_\lambda (x,y)\) as \(|x-y| \to \infty\). The purpose of the paper under review is to perform a similar analysis in the case where the operator is defined not on \(\mathbb{R}^d\) but on a (noncompact) abelian covering of a compact Riemannian manifold. Of particular interest is that the dimension of the covering itself does not appear explicitly in the asymptotics (which are rather too involved to be reproduced here); instead, it is the torsion-free rank of the abelian deck transformation group that plays a significant role.