Spectral gaps for self-adjoint second order operators (Q692846)

This paper deals with a second-order self-adjoint elliptic operator \(A\) in a bounded or unbounded domain \(\Omega\). The boundary \(\partial\Omega\) is equipped with both Dirichlet and Neumann boundary conditions. The sesquilinear form \(h\) corresponding to \(A\) contains a potential term \((Vu,v)_{L_2}\). Denote by \(H\) the self-adjoint operator \(H\) associated with the form \(h\) and by \(\sigma(\cdot)\) its spectrum. Put \(\lambda_0= \text{inf\,}\sigma(H)\) and \(\lambda= \text{inf\,}\sigma(H)\setminus\{\lambda_0\}\). The aim of this paper is to estimate the spectral gap between \(\lambda,\lambda_0\) supposing that both \(\lambda_0,\lambda\) are eigenvalues of \(H\) (lowest and second lowest) and such that \(\lambda_0<\lambda< 0\). The number \({\lambda-\lambda_0\over|\lambda|}\) is estimated from below in Theorem 2.2 by an explicit constant, depending on the geometric properties of \(\Omega\) and appropriate norms of \(V\) and \(V^-=-\min(V(x), 0)\), \(V= V^+- V^-\). The above-mentioned estimate is applied to several asymptotic regimes and its dependence on various parameters is studied in Theorems 2.4--2.7. In Section 3, a series of examples illustrating possible applications of Theorems 2.2, 2.4--2.7 is given.