On the absolutely continuous spectrum of generalized indefinite strings (Q2051467)

The paper mainly aims at investigating the absolutely continuous part of the spectrum of generalized indefinite strings associated with the ordinary differential equation of the form \[-f''=z\omega f +z^2 v f\text{ on }[0, L),\] where \(z\) is a complex spectral parameter. Spectral problems of this type are of interest for at least two reasons. Firstly, they constitute a canonical model for operators with simple spectrum; secondly, they are of relevance in connection with certain completely integrable nonlinear wave equations (most prominently, the Camassa-Holm equation), for which these kinds of spectral problems arise as isospectral problems. The proposed approach follows the ideas of Deift and Killip and are based on two main ingredients. The first ingredient is a continuity property for the correspondence between generalized indefinite strings and their associated Weyl-Titchmarsh functions. The relevance of the Weyl-Titchmarsh function here stems from the fact that a measure \(\mu\) in a certain integral representation for this function is a spectral measure for the ordinary differential equation of the generalized indefinite strings. The second ingredient is a so-called trace formula, which provides a relation between the spectral/scattering data and the coefficients in the differential equation, and hence allows to control the spectral measure by means of the coefficients. In regard to the conservative Camassa-Holm flow, the presented results concern the absolutely continuous spectrum of the corresponding isospectral problem \[-g''+\frac{1}{4}g = z \omega g + z^2 v g, \quad \omega = u-u''\] on the real line. It is shown that under the assumption that \(u\) is a real-valued function such that \(u-1\) belongs to \(H^1(\mathbb R)\) and \(v\) is a non-negative finite Borel measure on \(\mathbb R\), the essential spectrum and the absolutely continuous spectrum of a self-adjoint realization of the isospectral problem above coincide with the interval \( [1/4, \infty)\).