Topology of quasi-periodic functions on the plane

I. A. Dynnikov ; S. P. Novikov

Trudy Matematicheskogo Instituta imeni V.A. Steklova, Tome 60 (2005) no. 1, pp. 1-26

Résumé

In this paper the topological theory of quasi-periodic functions on the plane is presented. The development of this theory was started (in another terminology) by the Moscow topology group in the early 1980s, motivated by needs of solid state physics which led to the necessity of investigating a special (non-generic) case of Hamiltonian foliations on Fermi surfaces with a multivalued Hamiltonian function [1]. These foliations turned out to have unexpected topological properties, discovered in the 1980s ([2], [3]) and 1990s ([4]–[6]), which led finally to non-trivial physical conclusions ([7], [8]) by considering the so-called geometric strong magnetic field limit [9]. A reformulation of the problem in terms of quasi-periodic functions and an extension to higher dimensions in 1999 [10] produced a new and fruitful approach. One can say that for monocrystalline normal metals in a magnetic field the semiclassical trajectories of electrons in the quasi-momentum space are exactly the level curves of a quasi-periodic function with three quasi-periods which is the restriction of the dispersion relation to the plane orthogonal to the magnetic field. The general study of topological properties of level curves for quasi-periodic functions on the plane with arbitrarily many quasi-periods began in 1999 when some new ideas were formulated in the case of four quasi-periods [10]. The last section of this paper contains a complete proof of these results based on the technique developed in [11] and [12]. Some new physical applications of the general problem were found recently [13].