Dirac structures and their composition on Hilbert spaces (Q994311)

Dirac structures appear naturally in the study of certain classes of physical models described by partial differential equations and they can be regarded as the underlying power conserving structures. In the paper under review, the authors study these structures and their properties from an operator-theoretic point of view. In particular, necessary and sufficient conditions are obtained for the composition of two Dirac structures to be a Dirac structure and it is shown that they can be seen as Lagrangian (hyper-maximal neutral) subspaces of Kreĭn spaces. Moreover, special emphasis is laid on Dirac structures associated to operator colligations. It turns out that this class of Dirac structures is linked to boundary triplets and is closed with respect to composition.