Zero measure Cantor spectrum for aperiodic metric tiling graphs

Abstract

We study a family of aperiodic metric graphs generated by one-dimensional tilings. We prove that, generically, the spectrum of the associated Kirchhoff Laplacian has Lebesgue measure zero and, apart from a discrete set of isolated eigenvalues, is a generalized Cantor set. For a large subclass of these graphs, we further show that isolated eigenvalues are generically absent. This extends several well-known results from the setting of discrete ergodic Schrödinger operators on $\mathbb{Z}$ to a large family of metric graphs. Earlier results of this kind for metric graphs typically assume equilateral edges and exploit symmetries that reduce the analysis to a Sturm-Liouville operator on the real line. By contrast, the graph families considered here need not have equilateral edges or the symmetries needed for such a reduction and therefore require a different analytical approach.