THE ESSENTIAL SPECTRUM OF SCHRODINGER,¨ JACOBI, AND CMV OPERATORS YORAM LAST1;3 AND BARRY SIMON2;3 Abstract. We provide a very general result that identifies the essential spectrum of broad classes of operators as exactly equal to the closure of the union of the spectra of suitable limits at infinity. Included is a new result on the essential spectra when potentials are asymptotic to isospectral tori. We also recover with a unified framework the HVZ theorem and Krein’s results on orthogonal polynomials with finite essential spectra. 1. Introduction One of the most simple but also most powerful ideas in spectral the- ory is Weyl’s theorem, of which a typical application is (in this intro- duction, in order to avoid technicalities, we take potentials bounded): Theorem 1.1. If V; W are bounded functions on Rº and limjxj!1[V (x) ¡ W (x)] = 0, then σess(¡∆ + V ) = σess(¡∆ + W ) (1.1) Our goal in this paper is to find a generalization of this result that allows “slippage” near infinity. Typical of our results are the following: Theorem 1.2. Let V be a bounded periodic function on (¡1; 1) d2 2 and HV the operator ¡ dx2 + V (x) on L (R). For x > 0, define p d2 2 W (x) = V (x + x) and let HW be ¡ dx2 + W (x) on L (0; 1) with some selfadjoint boundary conditions at zero. Then σess(HW ) = σ(HV ) (1.2) Date: March 7, 2005. 1 Institute of Mathematics, The Hebrew University, 91904 Jerusalem, Israel. E- mail:
[email protected].