Linear invariant measures for recurrent linear systems (Q1905780)

The authors consider the real linear system \[ z' = \left( \begin{matrix} a_0 (t) & b_0 (t) \\ c_0 (t) & - a_0 (t) \end{matrix} \right) {z_1 \choose z_2} = S_0 (t)z \tag{1} \] whose matrix of coefficients is uniformly continuous, bounded and with trace zero. If \(\Omega\) is the hull of \(S_0\) in the topology of the uniform convergence on the compact sets, the translation \(\mathbb{R} \times \Omega \to \Omega\), \((t, \xi (s)) \mapsto \xi (t + s)\) defines a flow \(\Xi\) on \(\Omega\); let \(S : \Omega \to sl (2,\mathbb{R})\) be the operator which takes \(\xi \in \Omega\) to \(\xi (0)\); taking \(\xi = S_0\) we obtain \(S(\xi_t) = S_0(t)\), that is \(S_0\) is extended to a function \(S \in C (\Omega, sl (2, \mathbb{R}))\) which leads us to consider the family of linear systems \[ z' = \left( \begin{matrix} a (\xi_t) & b (\xi_t) \\ c (\xi_t) & - a (\xi_t) \end{matrix} \right) z = S (\xi_t) z \tag{2} \] where (1) is included. The authors investigate the spectral problems for the self-adjoint operators \[ {\mathcal L}_\xi z = \left( \begin{matrix} 0 & - 1 \\ 1 & 0 \end{matrix} \right) \bigl( z' - S (\xi_t) z \bigr) = Ez \] defined in the domain \(D = \{z;z\) is absolutely continuous and \(z,z' \in L^2 (\mathbb{R}, C^2)\}\), by the one parameter family of bidimensional linear systems (2). Each linear equation induces a continuous flow in the projective bundle where is defined a product measure. This paper connects two topics with each other, of spectral and ergodic nature. The authors extend the Ishii-Pastur-Kotani theory identifying the absolutely continuous spectrum, deducing that for almost every \(E\) with null Lyapunov exponent the real projective flow admits absolutely continuous invariant measures with square integrable density function.