Green's function asymptotics near the internal edges of spectra of periodic elliptic operators. Spectral gap interior (Q680710)

Consider a linear second order elliptic operator in \(\mathbb{R}^d\) with periodic coefficients \[ L(x,D)=\sum_{k,l=1}^{d} D_{k}(a_{kl}(x)D_{l})+V(x). \] All coefficients \(a_{kl}, V\) are smooth real-valued functions on \(\mathbb{R}^d\), periodic with respect to the integer lattice \(\mathbb{Z}^d\) in \(\mathbb{R}^d\), i.e., \(a_{kl}(x+n)=a_{kl}(x)\) and \(V(x+n)=V(x)\), \(\forall x \in \mathbb{R}^{d}, n \in \mathbb{Z}^d\). The operator \(L\) is assumed to be elliptic. The operator \(L\), with the Sobolev space \(H^{2}(\mathbb{R}^d)\) as the domain, is an unbounded, self-adjoint operator in \(L^2(\mathbb{R}^d)\). The spectrum of \(L\) in \(L^{2}(\mathbb{R}^d)\) has a \textit{band-gap structure}, i.e., it is the union of a sequence of closed bounded intervals (\textit{bands}) \([\alpha_j, \beta_j] \subset \mathbb{R}\,(j=1,2,\dots)\): \(\sigma(L)=\bigcup_{j=1}^{\infty}[\alpha_j, \beta_j],\) such that \(\alpha_{j} \leq \alpha_{j+1}\), \(\beta_{j} \leq \beta_{j+1}\) and \(\lim_{j \rightarrow \infty}\alpha_j=\infty\). The bands can overlap when \(d>1\), but they leave open intervals in between, called \textit{spectral gaps}. The unit cube \([0,1]^{d} \subset \mathbb{R}^d\) a \textit{fundamental domain} of \(\mathbb{R}^d\) with respect to the lattice \(\mathbb{Z}^d\). The \textit{dual lattice} is \(2\pi \mathbb{Z}^d\) and its fundamental domain is \([-\pi,\pi]^{d}\) (\textit{Brillouin zone}). The authors consider a finite spectral gap \((\beta_{j},\alpha_{j+1})\) for some \(j \in \mathbb{N}\) and a value \(\lambda \in (\beta_j, \alpha_{j+1})\) which is close either to the spectral edge \(\beta_j\) or to the spectral edge \(\alpha_{j+1}\). They study the asymptotic behavior when \(|x-y|\to\infty\) of the Green's kernel \(G_{\lambda}(x,y)\) of the resolvent operator \((L-\lambda)^{-1}\). The main result of this paper provides the exact principal term of asymptotics, when the gap edge occurs at a symmetry point of the Brillouin zone. Floquet transform is used to reduce the problem to finding asymptotics of a scalar integral expression, which is close to the one arising when dealing with the Green's function of the Laplacian at a small negative level \(\lambda\).