Transport Properties of Kicked and Quasiperiodic Hamiltonians

We study transport properties of Schrödinger operators depending on one or more parameters. Examples include the kicked rotor and operators with quasi-periodic potentials. We show that the mean growth exponent of the kinetic energy in the kicked rotor and of the mean square displacement in quasiperiodic potentials is generically equal to 2: this means that the motion remains ballistic, at least in a weak sense, even away from the resonances of the models. Stronger results are obtained for a class of tight-binding Hamiltonians with an electric field E(t) = E ₀+ E ₁cos t. For with we show that the mean square displacement satisfies for suitable choices of , E ₀, and E ₁. We relate this behavior to the spectral properties of the Floquet operator of the problem.