Spectral instability for some Schrödinger operators (Q1576604)

In earlier papers the authors have shown that typical non-selfadjoint Schrödinger operators \(H\) exhibit spectral instability in the following sense. For any \(\varepsilon> 0\) there exist pairs \(\lambda\in \mathbb{C}\) and \(f\in \text{Dom}(H)\) such that \(\|Hf- \lambda f\|< \varepsilon\|f\|\) even though \(\lambda\) is not near the spectrum of \(H\). In this paper instability of an isolated and simple eigenvalue \(\lambda\) is measured by the condition number \(\kappa(\lambda)= (\int_R|f|^2)/(\int_R f^2)\) where \(f\) is a (complex) eigenfunction to \(\lambda\). The authors show that the condition numbers of eigenvalues of typical non-selfadjoint Schrödinger operators may be extremely large. They describe a stable procedure for computing eigensolutions for operators in dimension one such as the harmonic oscillator, and they apply the method to the complex resonances of a typical operator with a dilation potential.