Sturm-Liouville boundary value problems with operator potentials and unitary equivalence (Q424423)

If \(T\) is a nonnegative matrix, then the differential expression \(\mathcal A := - \frac{d^2}{dt^2} + T\) on the half line \({\mathbb R}_+\) and its selfadjoint realizations are well studied. Due to the Kato-Rosenblum theorem, all selfadjoint extensions of the corresponding minimal operator have the same absolutely continuous spectrum and their absolutely continuous parts are unitarily equivalent to the Friedrichs extension corresponding to the Dirichlet boundary value problem. The authors investigate the question whether this result remains valid for \(T\) being a nonnegative operator in a separable Hilbert space \({\mathcal H}\) instead of a matrix. It is shown that this is indeed true for nonnegative parts of realizations if and only if \(\inf \sigma_{ess}(T) = \inf \sigma(T)\). First, the case of a bounded \(T\) and then the case of an unbounded \(T\) is considered. In both cases, for the minimal operator \(A_{\min}\) induced by \(\mathcal A\), the Friedrichs, Neumann and Krein extensions \(A^F, \, A^N, \, A^K\) are identified. It is shown that \(A^F\) and \(A^N\) are absolutely continuous and unitarily equivalent. For an arbitrary selfadjoint extension \(\widetilde{A}\) of \(A_{\min}\), the absolutely continuous part \(\widetilde{A}^{ac}\) is studied. It turns out that \(\widetilde{A}^{ac}\) is unitarily equivalent to \(A^F\) if \(\inf \sigma_{ess}(T) = \inf \sigma(T)\) and \((\widetilde{A} - i)^{-1} - (A^F - i)^{-1}\) is compact. The authors apply the technique of boundary triplets and the corresponding Weyl functions. In particular, they solve a known problem concerning the construction of a boundary triplet with good properties for an infinite direct sum of symmetric operators. Finally, the results are applied to the differential expression \(\mathcal L := - \frac{\partial^2}{\partial t^2} - \sum_{j=1}^n \frac{\partial^2}{\partial x_j^2} + q(x)\) in the half space, where \(q\) is a bounded nonnegative function. Here, \(T\) is the minimal operator associated with the Schrödinger expression \(-\Delta_x + q(x)\).