Local spectral estimates and quantitative weak mixing for substitution \(\mathbb{Z}\)-actions (Q6986643)

The spectral theory of substitution systems is not very well understood, and this paper makes two significant contributions to improving our understanding of these systems. Earlier work by some of the authors [\textit{A. I. Bufetov} and \textit{B. Solomyak}, Adv. Math. 260, 84--129 (2014; Zbl 1339.37004); St. Petersbg. Math. J. 34, No. 3, 313--346 (2023; Zbl 1522.37027); Isr. J. Math. 263, No. 2, 965--1000 (2024; Zbl 1556.37011)] considered suspension flows over substitution systems and self-similar substitution flows. It is well-known that the spectral properties of dynamical systems can change entirely under Kakutani equivalence, so the issues considered here are entirely new even though the use of the spectral cocycle is a similar starting point to the work on flows. The two main results here give another setting in which dynamical systems related to an underlying matrix or set of eigenvalues behaves differently if that set meets the unit circle. \N\NThe first main result is that for a primitive aperiodic substitution with substitution matrix irreducible over the rationals and with no eigenvalue on the unit circle there is a clear dichotomy: Either the substitution system has non-trivial discrete spectrum, or its spectral measures of `cylindrical' functions of zero mean are uniformly log-Hölder regular (across all points of the unit circle). This gives rise to logarithmic decay estimates for the rate of quantitative weak-mixing for the system. The second main result concerns the delicate issues that arise in the `Salem' case, where the substitution matrix is assumed to have one Perron-Frobenius eigenvalue \(\alpha\), all other eigenvalues are of modulus no more than~\(1\), and some of them have modulus~\(1\). In this setting it is shown that for spectral parameters from \(\mathbb{Q}(\alpha)\) spectral measures of cylindrical functions satisfy Hölder bounds but that the Hölder exponent cannot be taken uniformly over all algebraic spectral parameters. Several innovative ideas are needed to achieve this, including for the quantitative weak-mixing results the development of a `quantitative Veech criterion' scheme of approximation of toral automorphism orbits by lattice points, and a form of `avalanche principle' giving a lower bound on the norm of a product of matrices each being a perturbation of a given primitive matrix.