Relative form boundedness and compactness for a second-order differential operator (Q596236)

The authors study the question when a multiplication operator \(A=w^{-1}a\) is relatively form bounded or relatively form compact with respect to a classical Sturm-Liouville operator \(T = w^{-1}(-(py')'+q)\); here \(w>0, p>0\), and \(q\) are real functions on an interval \((c,d)\subset\mathbb R\), \(a\) is almost everywhere nonnegative on \((c,d)\), and \(w, p^{-1}, q\), and \(a\) are locally Lebesgue integrable. These very particular results should be compared with the more general results by \textit{V. G. Maz'ja} and \textit{I. E. Verbitsky} [Acta Math. 188, 263--302 (2002; Zbl 1013.35021)] in the case of higher dimension and for perturbations that may be distributions and may change sign.