Sturm-Liouville problems with boundary conditions depending quadratically on the eigenparam\-eter (Q2566797)

The following Sturm-Liouville problem is studied \[ -y^{\prime \prime} + q y = \lambda y, x \in (0, 1) \] associated with the eigenparameter-dependent boundary conditions \[ y'(0)/y(0) = \cot \alpha, y'(1)/y(1) = R(\lambda), \] where \(q\) is an integrable function on \([0, 1]\), \(R(\lambda) = a \lambda^2 + b \lambda + c, a, b, c \in\mathbb{R}\), \(a\) is either positive or negative, and \(\alpha = 0\) is interpreted as the Dirichlet condition at \(x = 0\). Mainly, this article can be viewed as one of a series of papers to study the use of ``Crum-Darboux transformation'', which would produce a new problem of similar type with a simpler \(R(\lambda)\). The point is, the new problem is (almost) isospectral with the original, hence it produces classes of isospectral Sturm-Liouville problems of classical and eigenvalue-dependent types, and can be embedded into the stage of inverse spectral problems. In case of the quadratic \(R(\lambda)\) considered here, the Crum-Darboux transformation is repeated used to produce (almost) isospectral problems with \(R(\lambda)\) being bilinear or an affine function of \(\lambda\) (these cases has been treated previously by Binding, Browne, Code and Watson as the authors indicated), and finally to a problem with constant function. Accordingly, information of the eigenvalues are known.