computations of spectral radii on stronggstrong-spaces - cornell.pdfVIP

Contemporary Mathematics Computations of spectral radii on G-spaces Laurent Saloff-Coste and Wolfgang Woess Dedicated to Professor Toshikazu Sunada on the occasion of his 60th birthday Abstract. In previous work, we have developped methods to compute norms and spectral radii of transition operators on proper metric spaces. The oper- ators are assumed to be invariant under a locally compact, amenable group which acts with compact quotient. Here, we present several further applications of those methods. The first concerns a generalization of an identity of Hardy, Littlewood and P´olya. The second is a detailed study of a class of diffusion operators on a homogeneous tree, seen as a 1-complex. Finally, we investigate the implications of our method for computing spectral radii of convolution operators on general locally compact groups and Lie groups. 1. Introduction In a series of papers [13], [14], [15] based on ideas introduced by Soardi and Woess [18] and Salvatori [16], we have developed tools to compute the norms and/or spectral radii of Markov operators that are invariant under the left action of a group when the action is either transitive or almost transitive (i.e has a compact factor space). In [13], [14], we where concerned with countable homogeneous spaces. A typical example is given by the simple random walk on the vertex set of the (r + 1)- regular tree T = T . For each vertex v, set K (v, w) = 1/(r + 1) if w is a neighbor r of v, and K (v, w) = 0 otherwise. There are many groups G that act transitively on the vertex set of the tree and such that K (gv, gw) =