Speaker:
Rajinder Mavi
Institution:
UCI
Time:
Thursday, March 8, 2012 - 4:00pm to 6:00pm
Location:
RH 440R
The almost Matthieu operator arises as a model for Bloch electrons in a magnetic field. Aubry and Andre famously made a conjecture about the spectral properties of this operator more than thirty years ago. In the process of its study, variations of the conjecture arose naturally. Although the original conjecture was recently settled, new problems remain unsettled. We discuss some of these open problems and possible methods (and their shortcomings) to their solution.