Cantor spectrum for a class of $C^2$ quasiperiodic Schr\"odinger operators

Abstract

We show that for a class of $C^2$ quasiperiodic potentials and for any Diophantine frequency, the spectrum of the corresponding Schr\"odinger operators is Cantor. Our approach is of purely dynamical systems, which depends on a detailed analysis of asymptotic stable and unstable directions. We also apply it to general $\mathrm{SL}(2,\mathbb R)$ cocycles, and obtain that uniform hyperbolic systems form a open and dense set in some one-parameter family.