Weyl sums and the Lyapunov exponent for the skew-shift Schrödinger cocycle (Q2043641)

Summary: We study the one-dimensional discrete Schrödinger operator with the skew-shift potential \(2\lambda\cos\big(2\pi \big(\binom{j}{2}\omega+jy+x\big)\big)\). This potential is long conjectured to behave like a random one, i.e., it is expected to produce Anderson localization for arbitrarily small coupling constants \(\lambda>0\). In this paper, we introduce a novel perturbative approach for studying the zero-energy Lyapunov exponent \(L(\lambda)\) at small \(\lambda\). Our main results establish that, to second order in perturbation theory, a natural upper bound on \(L(\lambda)\) is fully consistent with \(L(\lambda)\) being positive and satisfying the usual Figotin-Pastur type asymptotics \(L(\lambda)\sim C\lambda^2\) as \(\lambda\to 0\). The analogous quantity behaves completely differently in the almost-Mathieu model, whose zero-energy Lyapunov exponent vanishes for \(\lambda<1\). The main technical work consists in establishing good lower bounds on the exponential sums (quadratic Weyl sums) that appear in our perturbation series.