An Operator-Fractal

Abstract

Certain Bernoulli convolution measures (μ) are known to be spectral. Recently, much work has concentrated on determining conditions under which orthonormal Fourier bases (i.e. spectral bases) exist. For a fixed measure known to be spectral, the orthonormal basis need not be unique; indeed, there are often families of such spectral bases. Let λ= 1/(2n) for a natural number n and consider the Bernoulli measure (μ) with scale factor λ. It is known that L^2(μ) has a Fourier basis. We first show that there are Cuntz operators acting on this Hilbert space which create an orthogonal decomposition, thereby offering powerful algorithms for computations for Fourier expansions. When L^2(μ) has more than one Fourier basis, there are natural unitary operators U, indexed by a subset of odd scaling factors p; each U is defined by mapping one ONB to another. We show that the unitary operator U can also be orthogonally decomposed according to the Cuntz relations. Moreover, this operator-fractal U exhibits its own self-similarity.