On the completeness of the root vector system of the Sturm-Liouville operator with general boundary conditions (Q951689)

The author studies the Sturm-Liouville boundary value problem \[ -y'' + q (x) y = \lambda y, \quad q \in L^{1} [0,1]\tag{1} \] on the interval \([0,1]\) with boundary conditions of the form \[ v=U_{j} (y) = a_{i 1} y (0) + a_{i 2} y' (0) + a_{i 3} y (1) + a_{i 4} y' (1) \quad (i = 1,2),\tag{2} \] where \(q\) is a complex-valued function, \(a_{i k} \in \mathbb{C},\) and the boundary form \(U_{1}\) and \(U_{2}\) being linearly independent. Let \(c (x,\lambda)\) and \(s (x,\lambda)\) denote the fundamental system of solutions of (1) corresponding to the initial conditions \(c (0,\lambda) = s' (0,\lambda) = 1 \) and \(c' (0,\lambda) = s (0,\lambda) = 0,\) and let \(\Delta (\lambda) = \det U (\lambda),\) where \[ U (\lambda) : = \left[ \begin{matrix} U_{1} (c (x,\lambda)) & U_{1} (s (x,\lambda)) \\ U_{2} (c (x,\lambda)) & U_{2} (s (x,\lambda)) \end{matrix} \right] \] is the characteristic determinant of the problem (1), (2). It is said that the boundary value problem (1), (2) is nondegenerate if the characteristic determinant \(\Delta (\lambda)\) is nonconstant i.e. \(\Delta (\lambda) \neq const.\) Supposing that \(q \in C^{k} [0,1]\) and \(q^{k} (0) \neq (-1)^{k} q^{(k)} (1)\) for some \(k \in \mathbb{Z}_{+},\) the author proves that the system of eigenfunctions and associated functions of the problem (1), (2) is complete and minimal in the space \(L^{p} [0,1] \;\;\;(1 \leq p < \infty).\) This is the main result of the paper.