The Maslov Index and the Spectra of Second Order Elliptic Operators

TL;DR

This paper establishes a connection between the spectral properties of second order elliptic operators and the Maslov index, providing new formulas for spectral flow and Morse index in various boundary conditions.

Contribution

It introduces a novel correspondence between self-adjoint extensions of elliptic operators and Lagrangian planes, extending spectral flow formulas to domains in H^1 and relating Maslov and Morse indices.

Findings

Derived a formula linking spectral flow to the Maslov index for elliptic operators.

Computed Morse index in terms of the Maslov index for various classes of operators.

Extended existing theories to include self-adjoint extensions with domains in H^1(Omega).

Abstract

We consider second order elliptic differential operators on a bounded Lipschitz domain $\Omega$. Firstly, we establish a natural one-to-one correspondence between their self-adjoint extensions, with domains of definition containing in $H^1(\Omega)$, and Lagrangian planes in $H^{1/2}(\partial\Omega)\times H^{-1/2}(\partial\Omega)$. Secondly, we derive a formula relating the spectral flow of the one-parameter families of such operators to the Maslov index, the topological invariant counting the signed number of conjugate points of paths of Lagrangian planes in $H^{1/2}(\partial\Omega)\times H^{-1/2}(\partial\Omega)$. Furthermore, we compute the Morse index, the number of negative eigenvalues, in terms of the Maslov index for several classes of the second order operators: the $\vec{\theta}-$periodic Schr\"odinger operators on a period cell $Q\subset \mathbb{R}^n$, the elliptic operators with Robin-type boundary conditions, and the abstract self-adjoint extensions of the Schr\"odinger operators on star-shaped domains. Our work is built on the techniques recently developed by B.Boo{\ss}-Bavnbek, K. Furutani, and C. Zhu, and extends the scope of validity of their spectral flow formula by incorporating the self-adjoint extensions of the second order operators with domains in the first order Sobolev space $H^1(\Omega)$. In addition, we generalize the results concerning relations between the Maslov and Morse indices quite recently obtained by G. Cox, J. Deng, C. Jones, J. Marzuola, A. Sukhtayev and the authors. Finally, we describe and study a link between the theory of abstract boundary triples and the Lagrangian description of self-adjoint extensions of abstract symmetric operators.