Functional-differential operators on geometrical graphs with global delay and inverse spectral problems

Abstract

We suggest a new concept of functional-differential operators with constant delay on geometrical graphs that involves {\it global} delay parameter. Differential operators on graphs model various processes in many areas of science and technology. Although a vast majority of studies in this direction concern purely differential operators on graphs (often referred to as quantum graphs), recently there also appeared some considerations of nonlocal operators on star-type graphs. In particular, there belong functional-differential operators with constant delays but in a {\it locally} nonlocal version. The latter means that each edge of the graph has its own delay parameter, which does not affect any other edge. In this paper, we introduce {\it globally} nonlocal operators that are expected to be more natural for modelling nonlocal processes on graphs. We also extend this idea to arbitrary trees, which opens a wide area of further research. Another goal of the paper is to study inverse spectral problems for operators with global delay in one illustrative case by addressing a wide range of questions including uniqueness, characterization of the spectral data as well as the uniform stability.