A Gelfand-Levitan trace formula for generic quantum graphs (Q2656220)

The Gelfand-Levitan trace formula is generalized to almost all quantum graphs with self-adjoint boundary conditions. Denoting the real valued potential on the quantum graph by \(q\), its number of edges by \(d\), and the length of the \(r\)-th edge \(e_r\) by \(\ell_r>0\), it is assumed that the potential on \(e_r\) satisfies \(q_r\in W^{1,1}(0,\ell_r)\). The coupling and boundary conditions at the vertices are described by an equation \[ (U-I)\Psi +i (U+I)\Psi =0, \] where \(U\) is a \(2d\times 2d\) matrix with \(-1\not \in\sigma (U)\). With \((\lambda _j(q))_{j=1}^\infty \) denoting the sequence of eigenvalues, for \(d=1\) the trace formula describes the sum over \(\lambda _j(q)-\lambda _j(0)-\ell^{-1}\int_0^\ell q(x)\,\text{d} x\). For a quantum graph, \(q\) has to be replaced by \(q_r\), and it is a nontrivial task to associate each of the eigenvalues \(\lambda _j(q)\) as well as \(\lambda _j(0)\) to a specific \(r\) so that the series converges and gives the desired result. Roughly said, the eigenvalues are grouped into subsequences \((\lambda _{rn})_{n=1}^\infty \) for \(r=1,\dots,d\) such that \(\sqrt{\lambda _{rn}}\) has the same asymptotic behaviour as the nonnegative zeros of the function \(z\mapsto \sin(z\ell_r)\). Then the Gelfand-Levitan type trace formula \[ \sum _{r=1}^d\sum _{n=0}^\infty \left[ \lambda _{rn}(q)-\lambda _{rn}(0)-\frac 1{\ell_r}\int_0^{\ell_r}q_r(x)\,\text{d}x \right] \] \[ = \sum _{r=1}^d\left[ \frac 14[q_r(\ell_r)+q_r(0)]-\frac 1{2\ell_r} \int_0^{\ell_r}q_r(x)\,\text{d}x \right] \] holds.