AKreinSpaceApproachtoSymmetricOrdinary-CiteSeer.PDFVIP

JOURNAL OF DIFFERENTIAL EQUATIONS 79, 3141 (1989) A Krein Space Approach to Symmetric Ordinary Differential Operators with an Indefinite Weight Function BRANKOCURGUS* Department of Mathematics, Western Washington University, Bellingham, Washington 98225 AND HEINZ LANGER Sektion Mathematik, Technische Vniversitiit Dresden, Mommsenstrasse 13, 8027 Dresden, German Democratic Republic Received January 5, 1988; revised January 28, 1988 0. INTRODUCTION In this paper we consider spectral properties of the differential problem l(f)=(-l)“(Pof’“‘)‘“‘+(-l)“-‘(p,f’”-”)’”~”+ ... +p,f=A.rf (0.1) on a finite or infinite interval (a, b) with real, locally summable coefficients l/PO,Pl, ..-3Pnv r under the assumptions that p0 O and that the weight function r changes its sign on (a, b). If r is positive, problem (0.1) can be studied in the context of Hermitian and self-adjoint operators in the Hilbert space L*(r) with the inner product (0.2) which leads, e.g., to the definition of a (matrix) spectral function and expansion theorems