Renormalization of aperiodic model lattices: spectral properties

Abstract

Many of the published results for one-dimensional deterministic aperiodic systems treat rather simplified electron models with either a constant site energy or a constant hopping integral. Here we present some rigorous results for more realistic mixed tight-binding systems with both the site energies and the hopping integrals having an aperiodic spatial variation. It is shown that the mixed Thue–Morse, period-doubling and Rudin–Shapiro lattices can be transformed to on-site models on renormalized lattices maintaining the individual order between the site energies. The character of the energy spectra for these mixed models is therefore the same as for the corresponding on-site models. Furthermore, since the study of electrons on a lattice governed by the Schrödinger tight-binding equation maps onto the study of elastic vibrations on a harmonic chain, we have proved that the vibrational spectra of aperiodic harmonic chains with distributions of masses determined by the Thue–Morse sequence and the period-doubling sequence are purely singular continuous.