Symplectic geometry and dissipative differential operators

DOI10.1016/J.JMAA.2014.01.019MaRDI QIDQ2338755zbMATH OpenOpenAlexWikidataFDO

Authors Siqin Yao, Jiong Sun, Anton Zettl

Publication date 27 March 2015

Published in Journal of Mathematical Analysis and Applications (Search for Journal in Brave)

Full work available at URL https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jmaa.2014.01.019

dissipative differential operators dissipative subspaces symplectic geometry

Linear boundary value problems for ordinary differential equations (34B05) Linear accretive operators, dissipative operators, etc. (47B44) General theory of partial differential operators (47F05) Applications of operator theory to differential and integral equations (47N20) Lagrangian submanifolds; Maslov index (53D12) Lagrange's equations (70H03) Hamilton's equations (70H05)

Review text

In what follows, I use the citation abbreviations as provided by the authors in the reference section. The present paper introduces (strictly/maximal) dissipative/accretive subspaces of complex symplectic spaces. To quote the authors: ``These definitions seem to be new but are minor variants of known definitions [\dots{}] I checked the background literature of the given reference [\textit{W. N. Everitt} and \textit{L. Markus}, Boundary value problems and symplectic algebra for ordinary differential and quasi-differential operators. Providence: American Mathematical Society (1999; Zbl 0909.34001)], especially [\textit{R. Abraham} and \textit{J. E. Marsden}, Foundations of mechanics. 2nd ed. Reading: The Benjamin/Cummings Publishing Company (1978; Zbl 0393.70001). I was not able to find these variants (this is quite clear, as Abraham and Mardsen have mostly dealt with real varieties and not necessarily with sets defined by inequalities). Given these definitions, a one-to-one correspondences between dissipative extensions/symmetric extensions/strictly dissipative operators of certain ordinary differential operators, which are studied by the authors in their preceding works, and dissipative/Lagrangian/strictly dissipative subspaces of a related complex symplectic space is established. The main gain is that the latter are easier to characterize than the former, and the paper provides the necessary tools to do that. This work can be seen as an extension of Everitt and Markus [loc.cit.] who characterized domains of selfadjoint differential operators in terms of Lagrangian subspaces and complex symplectic subspaces, whereas the present authors define dissipative and strictly dissipative subspaces for symplectic spaces and characterize the domains of dissipative and strictly dissipative differential operators. The paper is well written, and the proofs are mostly thoroughly stated. The reader might recognize a gap between required background knowledge for each section: In Sections 1 and 2, the authors are taking the reader literally by the hand and leading him/her carefully through the definitions, whereas Sections 3 and 4 require the reader to become familiar with the authors' earlier works. The merits of the results become visible either way. Another small critique regards Definition~8 and the subsequent Theorems 3 and 4: The definition of a Lagrangian space \(L\) already includes any element in \(L\) to be self-annihilating with respect to \([:]\), i.e., being a Lagrangian element. Then, using the proof of Theorem~3 one can see that a collection of Lagrangian elements generates a Lagrangian subspace. But the subspace \(D_L\) in Theorem~3 is chosen to be all Lagrangian elements of a dissipative subspace \(D\). Is not then \(D_L\) a maximal Lagrangian subset by definition? With this in mind, Theorem~4 becomes a rather trivial corollary of Theorem~3, as every non-Lagrangian element in a dissipative subspace is automatically strictly dissipative. This point of view might be beneficial for the reader to understand the underlying principles better. I would have welcomed some more directions for future research from the authors, in particular, ideas for other areas to which they can apply the introduced terminology. And lastly, a minor language-related comment: Why do the authors always write dissipative and accretive capitalized (i.e., ``Dissipative and ``Accretive)? These terms are not including names of persons. I think the proper way would be to write them using small letters.

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