Spectrum and extended states in a harmonic chain with controlled disorder: Effects of the Thue-Morse symmetry (Q2277000)

The authors study a 1D harmonic chain consisting - for instance - of an infinite (or cyclic) chain of identical springs separated by masses which can take two values. These values are distributed according to the celebrated Thue-Morse sequence, which gives a ``controlled disorder'' (between the ``order'' of periodicity, and the ``disorder'' of randomness). The spectrum of this chain is a Cantor-like set: the authors compute its Bouligand-Minkowski dimension, and show how numerical computations support the conjecture that the spectrum has Lebesgue measure zero. They prove that the integrated density of states on the gap is \((2k+1)/3\cdot 2^ p\) (k and p integers). Moreover they show that a dense subset of the spectrum gives rise to extended states: this astonishing property is due to the symmetries of the Prouhet-Thue-Morse sequence.