Publications

The spectral properties of a singular left-definite Sturm-Liouville operator $JA$ are investigated and described via the properties of the corresponding right-definite selfadjoint counterpart $A$ which is obtained by substituting the indefinite weight function by its absolute value. The spectrum of the $J$-selfadjoint operator $JA$ is real and it follows that an interval $(a,b)\subset\dR^+$ is a gap in the essential spectrum of $A$ if and only if both intervals $(-b,-a)$ and $(a,b)$ are gaps in the essential spectrum of the $J$-selfadjoint operator $JA$. As one of the main results it is shown that the number of eigenvalues of $JA$ in $(-b,-a) \cup (a,b)$ differs at most by three of the number of eigenvalues of $A$ in the gap $(a,b)$; as a byproduct results on the accumulation of eigenvalues of singular left-definite Sturm-Liouville operators are obtained. Furthermore, left-definite problems with symmetric and periodic coefficients are treated, and several examples are included to illustrate the general results.

Spectral points of positive and negative type, and type $\pi_{+}$ and type $\pi_{-}$ for closed linear operators and relations in Krein spaces are introduced with the help of approximative eigensequences. The main objective of the paper is to study these sign type properties in the non-selfadjoint case under various kinds of perturbations, e.g. compact perturbations and perturbations small in the gap metric. Many of the obtained perturbation results are also new for the special case of bounded and unbounded selfadjoint operators in Krein spaces.