Construction of real-valued localized composite Wannier functions for insulators (Q5962767)

The paper provides a detailed constructive algorithm to obtain composite Wannier functions which decay faster than the inverse of any polynomial (real-valued and almost-exponentially localized). To this end, one first considers a real periodic Schrödinger operator and one shows that it exhibits some interesting properties with respect to its orthogonal projector on the Bloch states. These properties are then generalized and used as axioms to derive the main result. This generalization works mainly because it involves only the fundamental symmetries of the projector. The paper concludes with a smoothing procedure which yields a global smooth symmetric Bloch frame arbitrarily close to a given one.