1996-Eigenvalues of regular Sturm-Liouville problems.pdfVIP

Eigenvalues of regular Sturm-Liouville problems Q. Kong and A. Zettl? Abstract The eigenvalues of Sturm-Liouville (SL) problems depend not only continuously but smoothly on the problem. An expression for the derivative of the n-th eigenvalue with respect to a given parameter: an endpoint, a boundary condition constant, a coe?cient or weight function, is found. 1 Introduction For a regular SL problem ?(py0)0 + qy = λwy (1.1) with Dirichlet boundary conditions (BC) y(a) = 0 = y(b) (1.2) P¨oschel and Trubowitz in [13], as part of their elegant exposition of inverse spectral theory, consider 2 the n-th eigenvalue λ = λn(q) as a function of q for q ∈ L (a, b), p = 1 = w, and show that λ is Frechet di?erentiable with derivative given by (in our notation) b 2 2 dλq(h) = Z u h, h ∈ L (a, b) (1.3) a where u is a normalized eigenfunction of λ. Their proof is long and technical. It is based on functional analysis in the Hilbert space L2(a, b), complex variable theory, and the asymptotic form of solutions for |λ| → ∞. Dauge and Hel?er in [7] show that the Neumann eigenvalues of a regular SL problem on an interval [a, b] are di?erentiable functions of the right endpoint b satisfying a di?erential equation of the form λ0 = u2(q ? λw); (1.4) and they indicate that a similar equation holds for the eigenvalues of other separated BC. These authors also point out that, with the exception of a special result for the Coulomb Hamiltonian, such