Periodic and Ergodic Spectral Problems

The main objective of the programme is to bring together specialists in periodic, almost- periodic and random problems to discuss recent developments and deep connections between the methods intrinsic for each of these research areas. In the last several years there emerged a number of methods that had originated in one of these topics (e.g. periodic or random operators) but later were successfully used to tackle problems in a parallel area (e.g. almost-periodic). This suggests that these three lines of research have more in common than previously believed, and the interaction between specialists working in each of these areas could lead to a better understanding of ergodic operators and take us closer to solving open problems. The programme will thus have three major themes: periodic, almost-periodic, and random operators acting in Rd or Zd; operators on manifolds or graphs and more general ergodic operators will be also considered. We also intend to address problems that lie at the interface of the main topics (e.g. "sheared" periodic operators), and applications in other areas of mathematics (e.g. geometry). At the beginning of the programme, there will be a two-week long instructional conference with six mini-courses of about ten lectures each. The courses will be designed for students and non-specialists, and will be organised in order to make them accessible to the UK community. Further there will be three workshops evenly spread over the period of the programme to cover more advanced results, each centred around one of the main themes of the programme. However, we do not plan to make these workshops too specialised, and expect that all three themes will be prominently represented at each of them. We plan to organise the programme in such a way that at any time a mixture of experts from at least two areas will be present at the Institute. The programme has received funding from the European Research Council under the European Union's Seventh Framework Programme (FP/2007-2013) / ERC Grant Agreement n. 291147.