Convergence of Hill's method for nonselfadjoint operators (Q2882333)

Hill's method is an approach to approximate the spectrum of periodic-coefficient differential operators. A set of Bloch operators is associated to the differential operator, one considers the corresponding eigenvalue problem and by applying Fourier transform techniques one obtains a sequence of finite dimensional matrix eigenvalue problems whose eigenvalues approximate the eigenvalues of the Bloch operator. The article refers to the convergence of this method. After some preliminaries on Hilbert-Schmidt operators, 2-modified Fredholm determinants and generalized periodic Evans function, the convergence of Hill's method is proved for the case of a second order differential operator with identity principal part. Generalizations of this result are discussed for second order operators with nontrivial principal coefficients as well as for higher order periodic-coefficient operators.