A fresh look at the Peierls-Onsager substitution

Abstract

We formulate a general version of the Peierls-Onsager substitution for a finite family of Bloch eigenvalues under a local spectral gap hypothesis, via strongly localized tight-frames and magnetic matrices. This extends the existing results to long-range magnetic fields without any slow-variation hypothesis and without any triviality assumption for the associated Bloch sub-bundle. Moreover, our results cover a large class of periodic, elliptic pseudo-differential operators. We also prove the existence of an approximate time evolution for initial states supported inside the range of the isolated Bloch family, with a precise error control.