Self-adjoint difference operators and symmetric Al-Salam-Chihara polynomials (Q1015401)

The main idea of the present paper stems from the fact that the Al-Salam--Chihara polynomials occur in the Askey scheme, so they are eigenfunctions to a specific second-order difference operator \(L\). The authors find a suitable Hilbert space \(H\) such that \(L\) is a selfadjoint operator on \(H\). They show that this operator is trace-class, and even in every Schatten class, by estimating its singular values. The spectral decomposition of \(L\) is given explicitly. It turns out that the positive discrete part corresponds to the symmetric Al-Salam--Chihara polynomials with parameter \(\beta\), and the negative to the symmetric Al-Salam--Chihara polynomials with parameter \(1/q^2\beta\).