Inverse problems for Sturm-Liouville differential operators with a constant delay (Q712659)

The authors investigate inverse problems for Sturm-Liouville operators with a constant delay. Inverse problems of spectral analysis consist in recovering operators from their spectral characteristics. Inverse problems have been studied fairly completely for Sturm-Liouville operators without delay. The authors study this problem for differential equations with delay. This paper deals with the differential equation \[ -y''(x)+q(x)y(x-a)=\lambda y(x),\;\;\;\;\;\;x\in(0,\pi) \] with the boundary conditions \[ y(0)=y^{(j)}(\pi)=0,\;\;\;\;j=0,1, \] where \(\lambda \) is the spectral parameter, \(a\in(0,\pi)\) and \(q\) is a complex-valued function such that \(q\in L(a,\pi)\) and \(q(x) \equiv 0\) for \(x\in [0,a]\). The main methods to study the inverse problem for Sturm-Liouville operators (like transformation operator method, method of spectral mappings) are not suitable for differential operators with delay. Therefore, some results on inverse problems for integro-differential operators with delay are used. The authors develop an approximation method to prove a uniqueness result in recovering operators from their spectra.