Close-packed Dimers on the Line: Diffraction versus Dynamical Spectrum

Abstract

The translation action of ℝd on a translation bounded measure ω leads to an interesting class of dynamical systems, with a rather rich spectral theory. In general, the diffraction spectrum of ω, which is the carrier of the diffraction measure, lives on a subset of the dynamical spectrum. It is known that, under some mild assumptions, a pure point diffraction spectrum implies a pure point dynamical spectrum (the opposite implication always being true). For other systems, the diffraction spectrum can be a proper subset of the dynamical spectrum, as was pointed out for the Thue-Morse sequence (with singular continuous diffraction) by van Enter and Miȩkisz (J. Stat. Phys. 66:1147–1153, 1992). Here, we construct a random system of close-packed dimers on the line that have some underlying long-range periodic order as well, and display the same type of phenomenon for a system with absolutely continuous spectrum. An interpretation in terms of ‘atomic’ versus ‘molecular’ spectrum suggests a way to come to a more general correspondence between these two types of spectra.