On the spectrum of periodic elliptic operators

Abstract

It was observed in [Su5] that the spectrum of a periodic Schrödinger operator on a Riemannian manifold has band structure if the transformation group acting on the manifold satisfies the Kadison property (see below for the definition). Here band structure means that the spectrum is a union of mutually disjoint, possibly degenerate closed intervals, such that any compact subset of R meets only finitely many. The purpose of this paper is to show, by a slightly different method, that this is also true for general periodic elliptic self-adjoint operators.