Perpendicular space accounting of localized states in a quasicrystal

Abstract

Quasicrystals can be described as projections of sections of higher dimensional periodic lattices into real space. The image of the lattice points in the projected out dimensions, called the perpendicular space, carries valuable information about the local structure of the real space lattice. In this paper, we show that perpendicular space projection can be used to analyze the elementary excitations of a quasicrystal. In particular, we consider the vertex tight binding model on the two dimensional Penrose lattice and investigate the properties of strictly localized states using perpendicular space images. Our method reproduces the previously reported frequencies for the six types of localized states in this model. We also calculate the overlaps between different localized states and show that the number of type-5 and type-6 localized states which are independent from the four other types is a factor of golden ratio \(\tau=(1+\sqrt{5})/2\) higher than previously reported values. Two orientations of the same type-5 or type-6 which are supported around the same site are shown to be linearly dependent with the addition of other types. We also show through exhaustion of all lattice sites in perpendicular space that any point in the Penrose lattice is either in the support of at least one localized state or is forbidden by local geometry to host a strictly localized state.