Cantor spectrum for the quasi-periodic Schrödinger equation (Q810730)

The paper is devoted to study the nature of the spectrum of the (Bohr) almost periodic Schrödinger operator and its discrete analogue. The following result is established: There is a residual subset \(F\subset {\mathbb{R}}^ k\) such that, if \(\gamma =(\gamma_ 1,\gamma_ 2,...,\gamma_ k)\in F\), then the following statement holds. There is a residual subset \(V=V(\gamma)\subset C^{\delta}(T^ k)\) such that, if \(Q\in V\) and \(\psi =(\psi_ 1,\psi_ 2,...,\psi_ k)\in T^ k\), then the operator \(H=H_{\psi}=-(d^ 2/dt^ 2)+Q(\psi +\gamma t)\) has Cantor spectrum. \([0\leq \delta <1\) a real number and \(C^{\delta}(T^ k)\) the corresponding Hölder space of real-valued functions on the torus \(T^ k={\mathbb{R}}^ k/{\mathbb{Z}}^ k\), so that \(0\leq \psi_ i\leq 1\) (1\(\leq i\leq k)\). Cantor spectrum for each \(\psi \in T^ k\) means the spectrum of H regarded as a selfadjoint operator on \(L^ 2({\mathbb{R}})\) is a closed nowhere dense subset of the real line.] Moser's technique is heavily used in the paper. Further the author conjectures that the statement is true for every rationally independent rotation vector \(\gamma \in {\mathbb{R}}^ k\).