Spectral enclosures for non-self-adjoint extensions of symmetric operators (Q1653296)

In the description of many quantum mechanical systems, operators appear as a consequence of heuristic arguments which suggest in a first step a formal expression for the Hamiltonian or Schrödinger operator describing the model. These operators \(S\) are typically unbounded and symmetric on a domain \(\operatorname{dom}{S}\) which is a dense subspace of a Hilbert space \(\mathcal{H}\). In a second crucial step for the description of the quantum mechanical system, one has to choose a closed (in many cases self-adjoint) extension of \(S\) in order to start the analysis of the model. Typically, fixing an extension means to specify the relevant boundary conditions for the system. The paper under review focuses on the description of closed non-selfadjoint extensions of \(S\) which appear as restrictions of the adjoint operator \(S^*\) and on the analysis of some of their spectral properties. The article also presents in its final part several applications of their results to elliptic operators with local and non-local Robin boundary conditions on unbounded domains, to Schrödinger operators with \(\delta\)-interactions, and to quantum graphs with non-self-adjoint vertex couplings. In the first part of the article, the authors use an abstract and systematic approach to the description of extensions in terms of so-called boundary triples \((\Gamma_0,\Gamma_1,\mathcal{G})\), where \(\Gamma_{0,1}: \operatorname{dom}S^*\to \mathcal{G}\) satisfy a Green identity on the auxiliary Hilbert space \(\mathcal{G}\). Boundary triples (or their generalizations called quasi boundary triples) provide a useful technique to describe extensions encoding abstractly the boundary data of the problem. To formulate their main results in this part (e.g., Theorem 3.1), the authors use the Weyl function, which is an operator-valued function on the auxiliary Hilbert space defined in terms of the boundary triples. In addition, they introduce also a boundary operator \(B\) (in general non-symmetric) which serves to label the different extensions. The article has an informative and well-written introduction to the topic describing their methods and results, but also introducing the reader to the literature and alternative approaches in this very active field. The bibliography list contains more than 130 references.