Self-adjoint and skew-symmetric extensions of the Laplacian with singular Robin boundary condition (Q1671201)

The authors study the Laplacian in a bounded domain, with a varying Robin boundary condition singular at one point. Specifically, they consider a domain \(\Omega\subset{\mathbb R}^2\) enveloped by a smooth simple contour \(\partial\Omega\) and the Robin-type boundary condition \(a\, \partial u/ \partial n-u=0\). Here, \(a\) is a continuous function defined on \(\partial \Omega\) which vanishes at one point at order one. In contrast with the case of \(a>0\), the associated quadratic form is not semi-bounded from below, and the corresponding Laplacian is not self-adjoint, it has a residual spectrum covering the whole complex plane. The authors describe its self-adjoint extensions and exhibit a physically relevant skew-symmetric one. They approximate the boundary condition, giving rise to a family of self-adjoint operators, and they describe its spectrum by the method of matched asymptotic expansions. A part of the spectrum acquires a strange behavior when the small perturbation parameter \(\varepsilon>0\) tends to zero, namely it becomes almost periodic in the logarithmic scale \(\vert\log \varepsilon\vert\), and in this way ``wanders'' along the real axis at a speed \(O(\varepsilon^{-1})\).