Aperiodic order and quasicrystals: spectral properties (Q5907077)

Quasicrystals and other systems with aperiodic order are studied with respect to the nature of the spectrum of the associated Hamiltonians, using the framework of Delone to describe the aperiodic order. In the first part the paper is concerned with dicrete models. Delone sets with a topology and Delone dynamical systems are defined. The possibility of jumps of the integrated density of states of the Hamiltonians in question is investigated. This latter quantity is a function of energy, measuring the number of eigenstates with eigenvalue below the energy. For the Penrose tiling it is known that this function can exhibit jumps. This effect is based on the fact that the tilings in question allow for compactly supported eigenfunctions of the associated Laplacian. The main theorem shows that the integrated density of states is not continuous for Delone dynamical systems. These discontinuities can only arise in a certain way which is linked to the geometry of the Delone sets in question. In the last part a new result on spectral properties for continuum models is shown. It is proved that a certain family of models exhibits the spectral behaviour that is conjectured to be typical for quasicrystal Hamiltonians: purely singular continuous spectrum. To this end a complete metric space consisting of all Delone sets with suitabe parameters is considered and a Hamiltonian is associated with each of the sets. The result shows that a certain energy region consists of purely singular continuous spectrum for a dense subset of the metric space in question. This is the first result establishing a particular spectral type for multidimensional Hamiltonians associated to Delone sets.