Parametrization of the isospectral set for the vector-valued Sturm-Liouville problem (Q860804)

Consider the following inverse problems for the self-adjoint operator \(H\) in \(L^2(0, 1)^N\): \[ H \psi = - \psi^{\prime \prime} + V(x) \psi = \lambda \psi, \psi (0) = \psi (1) = 0, \] where \(V = V^* \in L^1 (0, 1)\) is some \(N \times N\) matrix-valued potential and \(\psi\) is a vector-valued function. Let \(\lambda_1 < \lambda_2 < \cdots < \lambda_\alpha < \cdots\) be the eigenvalues of \(H\), where each \(\lambda_\alpha, \alpha \geq 1\), has multiplicity \(k_\alpha \in [1, N]\). Let Iso\((V)\) denote the (isospectral) set of potentials in \(L^1 (0, 1)\) which introduce the same eigenvalues with the same multiplicities as \(V\) does. In this article, the authors show that the spectral data \(\{{\mathcal E}_\alpha, g_\alpha)\}_{\alpha \geq 1}\) (defined below) give a parametrization of Iso\((V)\). Here, \({\mathcal E}_\alpha \subset C^N\) is the kernel space of \(\phi (1, \lambda_\alpha)\) with \(\phi (x, \lambda)\) being the \(N \times N\) matrix-valued solution of the equation \(- \phi^{\prime \prime} + V \phi = \lambda \phi\) such that \(\phi(0, \lambda) = 0, \phi'(0, \lambda) = I\) (the identity matrix), dim\({\mathcal E}_\alpha = k_\alpha\); while \(g_\alpha\) is the positive self-adjoint operator on \({\mathcal E}_\alpha\) given by \(g_\alpha = G_\alpha |_{{\mathcal E}_\alpha}\) with \(G_\alpha = P_\alpha S_\alpha P_\alpha\), where \(P_\alpha\) is the orthogonal projection from \(C^N\) to \({\mathcal E}_\alpha\) and \(S_\alpha = \int_0^1 (\phi^* \phi) (t, \lambda_\alpha) dt = S_\alpha^* > 0\). Mainly, \(\{ ({\mathcal E}_\alpha, g_\alpha) \}\) are proved to be free parameters, that is, each \({\mathcal E}_\alpha\) and \(g_\alpha\) can be changed in an almost arbitrary way, when all other parameters \(\{ ({\mathcal E}_\beta, g_\beta) \} |_{\beta \not = \alpha}\) and the spectrum are fixed.