Instability zones of a periodic 1D Dirac operator and smoothness of its potential (Q2571250)

The authors study the following differential operator of first order \[ Ly=L\left(\begin{matrix} y_1\cr y_2\end{matrix}\right)\equiv\left(\begin{matrix} i{{dy_1}\over{dx}}+P(x)y_2\cr -i{{dy_2}\over{dx}}+Q(x)y_1\end{matrix}\right), \] with \(x\in[0,1]\subset{\mathbb R}\), \(P(x)\), \(Q(x)\), \(1\)-periodic functions, such that \(Q(x)=\overline{P(x)}\), and with the following boundary conditions: \(y(0)=y(1)\) (periodic), or \(y(0)=-y(1)\) (antiperiodic). Such an operator has real eigenvalues and for large \(| n| \) it has close to \(n\pi\), a pair of periodic (if \(n\) is even), or antiperiodic (if \(n\) is odd) eigenvalues \(\lambda_n^+\), \(\lambda_n^-\). The differences \(\gamma_n\equiv\lambda_n^+-\lambda_n^-\), \(n\in{\mathbb Z}\), are called the lengths of spectral gaps, or lengths of instability zones. The authors are interested to study the relationship between the decay rate of \(\gamma_n\), \(n\to\pm\infty\), with the smoothness of a potential \(P\). The main result is an estimate for such behaviour for suitable \(P\in L^2([0,1])\) (see Theorem 1.1 in Section 4). Further related results are also obtained. \textbf{Remark}. This paper uses standard techniques of functional analysis to obtain interesting results.