Spectral analysis of singular ordinary differential operators with indefinite weights (Q963021)

The authors develop a perturbation approach to investigate spectral problems for singular ordinary differential operators with indefinite weight functions. They prove a general perturbation result on the local spectral properties of selfadjoint operators in Krein spaces which differ only by finitely many dimensions from the orthogonal sum of a fundamentally reducible operator and an operator with finitely many negative squares. This result is applied to singular indefinite Sturm-Liouville operators and higher order singular ordinary differential operators with indefinite weight functions.