Don't mind the gap: Absolutely Continuous Edge Spectrum in a Mobility Gap

Abstract

We study the edge spectrum of two-dimensional lattice Hamiltonians and magnetic Schrödinger operators in a mobility gap, an energy interval in which the bulk spectrum is potentially localized rather than necessarily absent. Under suitable localization and boundary assumptions, we prove that a constant nonzero bulk topological index implies that the entire interval belongs to the absolutely continuous spectrum of the corresponding half-space operator. The absolutely continuous spectral multiplicity is bounded below by the absolute value of the index at almost every energy in the interval. The first version of the auxiliary-space cut construction in Section 2.3 was generated using ChatGPT 6.