Spectral properties of non-unitary band matrices (Q892617)

In mathematical physics, there are numerous important results, which have found many applications, based on the spectral theory of self-adjoint and unitary operators. However, the general spectral theory of operators is more vast, technically more involved and less well understood despite the fact that it was the scope of many works. In this paper, the authors introduce and analyze the spectral properties of a set of non-normal operators possessing a band structure in a certain basis, which share some similarities with the tri-diagonal non-self-adjoint operators. The proposed operators have a five-diagonal structure and are obtained as deformations of certain unitary operators called CMV matrices -- they are similar to Jacobi matrices for self-adjoint operators. The considered operators are a natural consequence of the study of random quantum walks on certain infinite graphs, which provide unitary dynamical systems of interest for physics, computer science, and probability theory. The whole paper is divided into six sections. After preliminaries in the introduction, Section 2 gives a short summary of the relevant features necessary to make a connection between the non-unitary operators considered in this paper and random quantum walks on \(\mathcal{T}_4\) and \(\mathbb{Z}_2\). This link is explicitly given in the next section. Then, in Sections 4 and 5, we have the spectral properties of non-unitary operators developed together with the consequences that can be drawn for the random quantum walks. The last section is devoted to the special case where the disc radius is 0.