Weakly resonant tunneling interactions for adiabatic quasi-periodic Schrodinger operators

Abstract

In this paper, we study spectral properties of the one dimensional periodic Schrodinger operator with an adiabatic quasi-periodic perturbation. We show that in certain energy regions the perturbation leads to resonance effects related to the ones observed in the problem of two resonating quantum wells. These effects affect both the geometry and the nature of the spectrum. In particular, they can lead to the intertwining of sequences of intervals containing absolutely continuous spectrum and intervals containing singular spectrum. Moreover, in regions where all of the spectrum is expected to be singular, these effects typically give rise to exponentially small "islands" of absolutely continuous spectrum.