Spectral expansion for a nonselfadjoint periodic differential operator (Q871759)

The author looks at the spectra of differential operators acting in \[ L^{2}( \mathbb{R}) \] and generated by \[ l(y)=y^{(n)}+p_{2}( x) y^{(n-2)}+\dots+p_{n}(x)y, \] where \(p_{k}\) are \(1\)-periodic complex-valued and locally Lebesgue integrable coefficients. It is known that they are the union of the spectra \(\sigma _{t}\) of the operators restricted to \(L^{2}( 0,1) \) with the boundary conditions \[ U_{\nu }(y):=y^{( \nu -1) }(1)-e^{it}y^{( \nu -1) }(0)=0\text{ for }\nu =1,2,\dots,n. \] By using the characteristic (Hill's) determinant it is shown that the spectrum \(\sigma _{t}\) is the sequence \(\{ \lambda _{k}( t) :k\in \mathbb{Z}\} \) and all large eigenvalues are simple and have the asymptotics \[ \lambda _{k}( t) =( i( 2k\pi +t) ) ^{n}+O( k^{n-2}). \]