The structure of the spectrum of a system of difference equations (Q2484626)

This paper is concerned with the spectrum of the the system \[ \begin{aligned} a_{n+1}y_{n+1}^{(2)}+b_{n}y_{n}^{(2)}+p_{n}y_{n}^{(1)} &=\lambda y_{n}^{(1)}, \tag{1}\\ b_{n}y_{n}^{(1)}+a_{n-1}y_{n-1}^{(1)}+q_{n}y_{n}^{(2)} &=\lambda y_{n}^{(2)},\tag{2}\end{aligned} \] where \(n\in \mathbb Z=\{0,\pm 1,\pm 2,\dots \},\) \(\{ a_{n}\} _{n\in \mathbb Z},\{ b_{n}\} _{n\in \mathbb Z},\{ p_{n}\} _{n\in \mathbb Z},\{ q_{n}\} _{n\in \mathbb Z}\) are complex valued sequences, and \(a_{n}\neq 0,b_{n}\neq 0\) for \(n\in \mathbb Z.\) The main result is the following: If for some \( \varepsilon >0\) and \(\delta \in [1/2,1),\) \[ \sum_{n\in \mathbb Z}\exp ( \varepsilon | n| ^{\delta }) (| 1-a_{n}| +| 1+b_{n}| +| p_{n}| +| q_{n}| )<\infty , \] then the above equation has a finite number of eigenvalues and spectral singularities (essentially they are roots of the Casorati determinant of two particular solutions), and each of them is of finite multiplicity. System (2) does not follow from (1) by taking \(\{ a_{n}\} =\{ 1\} \) and \(\{ b_{n}\} =\{ -1\} ,\) and therefore it is probably not appropriate to call it a discrete Dirac system.