[Retracted] Eigenvalue Comparisons for Second-Order Linear Equations with Boundary Value Conditions on Time Scales
Chao Zhang1and Shurong Sun1
Academic Editor: Kai Diethelm
Received29 Jan 2012
Revised22 Mar 2012
Accepted22 Mar 2012
Published21 May 2012
Abstract
This paper studies the eigenvalue comparisons for second-order linear equations with boundary conditions on time scales. Using results from matrix algebras, the existence and comparison results concerning eigenvalues are obtained.
1. Introduction
In this paper, we consider the eigenvalue problems for the following second-order linear equations:
with the boundary conditions
where and are parameters, and are the forward and backward jump operators, is the delta derivative, , and is a finite isolated time scale; the discrete interval is given by
We assume throughout this paper that, , and are real-valued functions on , , on and on ;.
First we briefly recall some existing results of eigenvalues comparisons for differential and difference equations. In 1973, Travis [1] considered the eigenvalue problem for boundary value problems of higher-order differential equations. He employed the theory of -positive linear operator on a Banach space with a cone of nonnegative elements to obtain comparison results for the smallest eigenvalues. A representative set of references for these works would be Davis et al. [2], Diaz and Peterson [3], Hankerson and Henderson [4], Hankerson and Peterson [5β7], Henderson and Prasad [8], and Kaufmann [9]. However, in all the above papers, the comparison results are for the smallest eigenvalues only. The main purpose of this paper is to establish the comparison theorems for all the eigenvalues of (1.1) with (1.3) and (1.2) with (1.3).
Like the eigenvalue comparison for the boundary value problems of linear equations, this type of comparison of eigenvalues in matrix algebra is known as Weylβs inequality [10, Corllary 6.5.]: If are Hermitian matrices, that is, , where is the conjugate transpose of and is positive semidefinite, then , where and are all eigenvalues of and . Associated with this conclusion is spectral order of operators. The spectral order has proved to be useful for solving several open problems of spectral theory and has been studied in the context of von Neumann algebras, matrix algebras, and so forth in [10β15]. Recently, Hamhalter [15] studied the spectral order in a more general setting of Jordan operator algebras, which is a generalization of the result due to Kato [13]. And as a preparatory material, he extended Olsonβs characterization of the spectral order to JBW algebras [14]. Since the boundary value problems (1.1), (1.3) and (1.2), (1.3) can be rewritten into matrix equations, we employ some results from matrix algebras to establish the comparison theorems for the eigenvalues of (1.1), (1.3) and (1.2), (1.3).
This paper is organized as follows. Section 2 introduces some basic concepts and a fundamental theory about time scales, which will be used in Section 3. By some results from matrix algebras and time scales, the existence and comparison theorems of eigenvalues of boundary value problems (1.1), (1.3) and (1.2), (1.3) are obtained, which will be given in Section 3.
2. Preliminaries
In this section, some basic concepts and some fundamental results on time scales are introduced.
Let be a nonempty closed subset. Define the forward and backward jump operators by
where . We put if is unbounded above and otherwise. The graininess functions are defined by
Let be a function defined on . is said to be (delta) differentiable at provided there exists a constant such that for any , there is a neighborhood of (i.e., for some ) with
In this case, denote . If is (delta) differentiable for every , then is said to be (delta) differentiable on . If is differentiable at , then
For convenience, we introduce the following results ([16, Chapter 1], [17, Chapter 1], and [18, Lemma 1]), which are useful in this paper.
Lemma 2.1. Let and .(i)If and are differentiable at , then is differentiable at and
(ii)If and are differentiable at , and , then is differentiable at and
3. Eigenvalue Comparisons
In the following, we will write if and are symmetric matrices and is positive semidefinite. A matrix is said to be positive if every component of the matrix is positive. We denote , and .
It follows from Lemma 2.1(ii), (2.4), and (1.4) that the boundary value problem (1.1), (1.3) can be written in the form
wherewhere donatesββ, donates, donates , donates , and donates .
And the problem (1.2), (1.3) is equivalent to the equation
where
Since the solutions of (1.1), (1.3) can be written into the form of vectors, then the nontrivial solution corresponding to is called an eigenvector.
Let be the th column of the identity matrix of order and
Define . It is easily seen that
It follows from , and (3.8) that
For any , we have
Moreover, implies . Hence, the matrix is positive definite.
Lemma 3.1. If is an eigenvalue of the boundary value problem (1.1), (1.3) and is a corresponding eigenvector, then(i),(ii) is real and positive. If is an eigenvalue of the boundary value problem (1.1), (1.3) and is a corresponding eigenvector, then .
Proof. (i) It follows from (H1) and (3.2) that . Assume the contrary that , we have . Since is positive definite, then , which is a contradiction. (ii) We can write
which implies , that is, is real. Since is positive definite and , we have . If and , then
Hence, . This completes the proof.
Lemma 3.2. If is an eigenvalue of the boundary value problem (1.1), (1.3), then is an eigenvalue of . If is a positive eigenvalue of , then is an eigenvalue of (1.1), (1.3), respectively.
Proof. If is an eigenvalue of the boundary value problem (1.1), (1.3) and is a corresponding eigenvector, then and . Therefore,
With a similar argument, one can get that if is a positive eigenvalue of , then is an eigenvalue of (1.1), (1.3). This completes proof.
Lemma 3.3. For any , define . We have(i);(ii) = β + .
Proof. It is easy to see that if , while if . Hence,
(i)It is seen from (3.10) and (3.15) that
(ii)It follows from (3.7) and the Sherman-Morrison updating formula [19] that
leading to
which, together with (i), further implies the result (ii). This completes the proof.
Theorem 3.4.
(i) If is an eigenvalue of the boundary value problem (1.1), (1.3) and is a corresponding eigenvector, then and .
(ii) If is the smallest eigenvalue of the boundary value problem (1.1), (1.3), then there exists a positive eigenvector corresponding to .
Proof. (i) Assume the contrary that either or . By the boundary condition (1.3), we can easily deduce a contradiction . (ii) It follows from that is the maximum eigenvalue of and the is an eigenvector corresponding to . By Lemma 3.3, we have that all the elements of are positive, then is a positive matrix. Since for all , hence, the following discussions are divided into two cases. Case 1. If for all , then we obtain that the matrix is positive and therefore, the result follows from the Perron-Forbenius theorem [20].Case 2. Let for some . Without loss of generality, we assume that for all and for all ; we can write as follows:
where is an matrix and is an matrix. Both and are positive matrices. is also the maximum eigenvalue of . Applying the Perron-Forbenius theorem to the positive matrix , there exists a positive vector such that . Let and . Obviously, we have
This completes the proof.
Lemma 3.5. If is an eigenvalue of the boundary value problem (1.1), (1.3), then the dimension of the null space of is 1.
Proof. Let and be any two eigenvectors of the boundary value problem (1.1), (1.3) corresponding to and define . Obviously, we have
which, together with , indicates that , that is, . Therefore, and are linearly dependent. So the dimension of the null space of is 1. This completes the proof.
Lemma 3.6. Let be the number of positive elements in the set . Then there are distinct eigenvalues of the boundary value problem (1.1), (1.3) and are the only positive eigenvalues of .
Proof. Suppose that are all eigenvalues of . Since is real and symmetric that there exists an orthogonal matrix such that
therefore, we have that
indicating that the number of positive is the same as that of positive number in which is equal to . Suppose that for some where . Observe that in view of (3.22), which further implies that
Thus, we have two independent vectors in the null space of for , which contradicts Lemma 3.5. Thus, from Lemma 3.2, we see that gives the complete set of eigenvalues of the boundary value problem (1.1), (1.3). This completes the proof.
Theorem 3.7. Let be the number of positive elements in the set and the number of positive elements in the set . Let be the set of all eigenvalues of the boundary value problem (1.1), (1.3) and the set of all eigenvalues of the boundary value problem (1.2), (1.3). If for all , then for .
Proof. It follows from Lemma 3.6 that
are the eigenvalues of and , respectively. If for all , then , implying
By Weylβs inequality and (3.26), we have
Finally, it is easily seen from (3.25) and (3.27) that
implying that for . This completes the proof.
Acknowledgments
Many thanks are due to Kai Diethelm (the editor) and the anonymous reviewer(s) for helpful comments and suggestions. This paper was supported by the NNSF of China (Grants nos. 11071143 and 11101241), the NNSF of Shandong Province (Grants nos. ZR2009AL003, ZR2010AL016, and ZR2011AL007), the Scientific Research and Development Project of Shandong Provincial Education Department (J11LA01), and the NSF of University of Jinan (XKY0918).
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