Golden mean renormalization for the almost Mathieu operator and related skew products

Abstract: Considering SL(2,R) skew-product maps over circle rotations, we prove that a renormalization transformation associated with the golden mean alpha has a nontrivial periodic orbit of length 3. We also present some numerical results, including evidence this period 3 describes scaling properties of the Hofstadter butterfly near the top of the spectrum at alpha, and scaling properties of the generalized eigenfunction for this energy.