Joint spectrum, group representations, and Julia set

Abstract

The first half of this mostly expository note reviews some notions of joint spectrum of linear operators, and it gives a new characterization of amenable groups in terms of projective spectrum. The second half revisits an application of projective spectrum to the study of self-similar group representations made in [16]. In the case $\pi$ is the Koopman representation of the infinite dihedral group $D_\infty$ on the binary tree, it shows that the projective spectrum of $D_\infty$ coincides with the Julia set of a rational map $F_\pi: \mathbb{P}^2\to \mathbb{P}^2$ derived from the self-similarity of $\pi$. This improves the main result in [16].