Purely singular continuous spectrum for limit-periodic CMV operators with applications to quantum walks

We show that a generic element of a space of limit-periodic CMV operators has zero-measure Cantor spectrum. We also prove a Craig-Simon type theorem for the density of states measure associated with a stochastic family of CMV matrices and us our construction from the first part to prove that the Craig-Simon result is optimal in general. We discuss applications of these results to a quantum walk model where the coins are arranged according to a limit-periodic sequence. The key ingredient in these results is a new formula which may be viewed as a relationship between the density of states measure of a CMV matrix and its Schur function. (C) 2017 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.