The Morse and Maslov indices for multidimensional Schrödinger operators with matrix-valued potentials

• Published in: Transactions of the American Mathematical Society 2016-11, Vol.368 (11), p.8145-8207
• Main Authors: Cox, Graham, Jones, Christopher K. R. T., Latushkin, Yuri, Sukhtayev, Alim
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Research article
• ISSN: 0002-9947; 1088-6850
• DOI: 10.1090/tran/6801

We study the Schrödinger operator L=−Δ+VL=-\Delta +V on a star-shaped domain Ω\Omega in Rd\mathbb {R}^d with Lipschitz boundary ∂Ω\partial \Omega. The operator is equipped with quite general Dirichlet- or Robin-type boundary conditions induced by operators between H1/2(∂Ω)H^{1/2}(\partial \Omega ) and H−1/2(∂Ω)H^{-1/2}(\partial \Omega ), and the potential takes values in the set of symmetric N×NN\times N matrices. By shrinking the domain and rescaling the operator we obtain a path in the Fredholm–Lagrangian Grassmannian of the subspace of H1/2(∂Ω)×H−1/2(∂Ω)H^{1/2}(\partial \Omega )\times H^{-1/2}(\partial \Omega ) corresponding to the given boundary condition. The path is formed by computing the Dirichlet and Neumann traces of weak solutions to the rescaled eigenvalue equation. We prove a formula relating the number of negative eigenvalues of LL (the Morse index), the signed crossings of the path (the Maslov index), the number of negative eigenvalues of the potential matrix evaluated at the center of the domain, and the number of negative eigenvalues of a bilinear form related to the boundary operator.