On the unitary equivalence of absolutely continuous parts of self-adjoint extensions (Q621820)

The classical Weyl-von Neumann theorem states that, if \(A\) is a selfadjoint linear operator on a separable Hilbert space and \(C\) is a selfadjoint trace class operator, then the absolutely continuous parts of \(A\) and \(A+C\) are unitarily equivalent. This theorem can be generalised to non-additive perturbations: the absolutely continuous parts of selfadjoint operators \(A\) and \(A_0\) are unitarily equivalent if their resolvent difference is trace class. On the other hand, the classical Kato-Rosenblum states that, for every selfadjoint operator \(A_0\) and every \(p\in(1,\infty]\), there exists a selfadjoint operator \(C\in \mathfrak S_p\) such that \(A_0 + C\) has no absolutely continuous spectrum. In this paper, the authors show a stability result for the absolutely continuous spectrum, and so prove that the Kato-Rosenblum theorem does not have a generalisation analogous to the one above. The main tools for the proof are boundary triplets derived from an abstract Green's formula and the corresponding Weyl function. More precisely, given a symmetric operator \(A\), a boundary triplet \(\{\mathcal H, \Gamma_0, \Gamma_1\}\) and a corresponding selfadjoint extension \(A_0\), a generalised Weyl function can be defined. If certain weak limits of this function exist, then the absolutely continuous part of any selfadjoint extension of \(A\) is unitarily equivalent to the absolutely continuous part of \(A_0\) provided that their resolvent difference belongs to \(\mathfrak S_\infty\), i.e., is compact. In the last section, the authors mention possible applications to Schrödinger operators.