Diffraction of return time measures (Q1730988)

The diffraction spectrum of a family of measures associated to ergodic transformations of the unit interval and weighting functions on the interval are studied. The measures are constructed as weighted Dirac combs along orbits of a reference point. In contrast to regular model sets arising from cut and project schemes, under quite mild conditions on the underlying map and on the weighting function, explicit calculations of the diffraction spectrum show the occurrence of an absolutely continuous contribution for almost every reference point. For rotations it is shown that the diffraction spectrum is a pure point for almost every reference point (and is so for all reference points for an ergodic rotation and a reasonable weighting function). Some new results on the limiting properties of diffraction spectra associated to convergent sequences of rotation numbers are found. Examples are constructed to explain the relationship between these results and those arising in the recent work of \textit{S. Beckus} and \textit{F. Pogorzelski} [``Delone dynamical systems and spectral convergence'', Ergodic Theory Dynam. Sys., to appear; \url{doi:10.1017/etds.2018.116}].