The Favard length of a set E has a probabilistic interpretation: up to a constant factor, it is the probability that the Buffon's needle, a long line segment dropped at random, hits E. In this talk, we study the Favard length of some random Cantor sets of dimension 1. Replace the unit disc by 4 disjoint sub-discs of radius 1/4 inside. By repeating this operation in a self-similar manner and adding a random rotation in each step, we can generate a random Cantor set D. Let D_n be the n-th generation in the construction, which is comparable to the 4^{-n}-neighborhood of D. We are interested in the decay rate of the Favard length of these sets D_n as n tends to infinity, which is the likelihood (up to a constant) that the Buffon's needle will fall into the 4^{-n}-neighborhood of D. It is well known that the lower bound for such 1-dimensional set is constant multiple of 1/n. We show that the upper bound of the Favard length of D_n is also constant multiple of 1/n in the average sense.

 

Abstract: In this talk, we consider the spectral gaps of quasi-periodic Schrodinger operators with Liouville frequencies. By establishing quantitative reducibility of the associated Schrodinger cocycle,  we show that the size of the spectral gaps decays exponentially. This is a joint work with Wencai Liu. 

We study the  XXZ quantum spin chain in  a random field. This model is particle number preserving, which allows  the reduction to an infinite system of discrete many-body random Schrodinger operators.  We exploit this reduction to prove a form of  Anderson localization in the droplet  spectrum of the XXZ quantum spin chain Hamiltonian. This yields a strong form of dynamical exponential clustering for eigenstates  in the droplet spectrum: For any pair of local observables,  the sum of the associated correlators over these states decays exponentially  in the distance between the  local observables. Moreover,  this exponential clustering persists under the time evolution in the  droplet spectrum.