Spectral properties of the biconfluent Heun differential equation (Q1184786)

The authors consider polynomial solutions of the biconfluent Heun equation \[ xu''+(1+\alpha-\beta x-2x^ 2)u'+\{(\gamma-\alpha-2)x- [\delta+\beta(1+\alpha)]/2\}u=0.\leqno (1) \] Equation (1) has important applications in quantum mechanics and theoretical physics. One of their two main results concerns the Newton sums (i.e. the sums of the \(r\)-th powers of the zeros) of such polynomials while the other one gives an approximate formula for the density of the zeros (i.e. the number of zeros per unit interval). The Newton sums are given by a recurrence relation, while the density function is calculated by BKW approximation. The results are applied to some simple examples. The basic ideas behind the derivations are not new. Notice that by a typographical error in the coefficient of \(u\) in (1) the term \((-\alpha x)\) reads \((-x^ 2)\), which is not compatible with the subsequent formulas.