Absolute continuity of the spectrum of a Schrodinger operator with a potential which is per.pdfVIP

a r X i v : m a t h - p h / 0 4 0 2 0 1 3 v 2 9 A p r 2 0 0 4 Absolute continuity of the spectrum of a Schro?dinger operator with a potential which is periodic in some directions and decays in others N. Filonov ? Department of Mathematical Physics St Petersburg State University 198504 St Petersburg-Petrodvorets, Russia email: filonov@mph.phys.spbu.ru F. Klopp ? LAGA, Institut Galile?e, Universite? Paris-Nord F-93430 Villetaneuse, France email: klopp@math.univ-paris13.fr February 7, 2008 1 Formulation of the result There are many papers (see, for example, [1, 9]) devoted to the question of the absolute continuity of the spectrum of differential operators with coef- ficients periodic in the whole space. In the present article, we consider the situation where the coefficients are periodic in some variables and decay very fast (super-exponentially) when the other variables tend to infinity. The corresponding operator describes the scattering of waves on an infinite mem- brane or filament. Recently, quite a few studies have been devoted to similar ?N.F.’s research was partially supported by the FNS 2000 “Programme Jeunes Chercheurs”. ?F.K.’s research was partially supported by the program RIAC 160 at Universite? Paris 13 and by the FNS 2000 “Programme Jeunes Chercheurs”. 1 problems, for periodic, quasi-periodic or random surface Hamiltonians (see, e.g. [3, 7, 2]). Let (x, y) denote the points of the space Rm+d. Define ? = Rm × (0, 2π)d and 〈x〉 = √x2 + 1. For a ∈ R, introduce the spaces Lp,a = {f : ea〈x〉f ∈ Lp(?)}, H2a = {f : ea〈x〉f ∈ H2(?)}, where 1 ≤ p ≤ ∞ and H2(?) is the Sobolev space. Our main result is Theorem 1.1. Consider in L2(R m+d) the self-adjoint operator Hu = ? div(g?u) + V u (1) and assume that the functions g : Rm+d → R and V : Rm+d → R satisfy following conditions: 1. ?l ∈ Zd, ?(x, y) ∈ Rm+d, g(x, y + 2πl) = g(x, y), V (x, y + 2πl) = V (x, y); 2. there exists g0 0 such that (g ? g0), ?g, V ∈ L∞,a for any a 0; 3. there exists c0 0 such that ?(x, y)