Singular Boundary Conditions for Sturm--Liouville Operators via Perturbation Theory

Abstract

We show that all self-adjoint extensions of semi-bounded Sturm--Liouville operators with general limit-circle endpoint(s) can be obtained via an additive singular form bounded self-adjoint perturbation of rank equal to the deficiency indices, say $d\in\{1,2\}$. This characterization generalizes the well-known analog for semi-bounded Sturm--Liouville operators with regular endpoints. Explicitly, every self-adjoint extension of the minimal operator can be written as \begin{align*} \boldsymbol{A}_\Theta=\boldsymbol{A}_0+{\bf B}\Theta{\bf B}^*, \end{align*} where $\boldsymbol{A}_0$ is a distinguished self-adjoint extension and $\Theta$ is a self-adjoint linear relation in $\mathbb{C}^d$. The perturbation is singular in the sense that it does not belong to the underlying Hilbert space but is form bounded with respect to $\boldsymbol{A}_0$, i.e. it belongs to $\mathcal{H}_{-1}(\boldsymbol{A}_0)$. The construction of a boundary triple and compatible boundary pair for the symmetric operator ensure that the perturbation is well-defined and self-adjoint extensions are in a one-to-one correspondence with self-adjoint relations $\Theta$. As an example, self-adjoint extensions of the classical symmetric Jacobi differential equation (which has two limit-circle endpoints) are obtained and their spectra are analyzed with tools both from the theory of boundary triples and perturbation theory.