Convergence of supercell and superspace methods for computing spectra of quasiperiodic operators

Abstract

We study the convergence of two of the most widely used and intuitive approaches for computing the spectra of differential operators with quasiperiodic coefficients: the supercell method and the superspace method. In both cases, Floquet-Bloch theory for periodic operators can be used to compute approximations to the spectrum. We illustrate our results with examples of Schrodinger and Helmholtz operators.