Characterization of domains of self-adjoint ordinary differential operators

The GKN (Glazman, Krein, Naimark) Theorem characterizes all self-adjoint realizations of linear symmetric (formally self-adjoint) ordinary differential equations in terms of maximal domain functions. These functions depend on the coefficients and this dependence is implicit and complicated. In the regular case an explicit characterization in terms of two-point boundary conditions can be given. In the singular case when the deficiency index d is maximal the GKN characterization can be made more explicit by replacing the maximal domain functions by a solution basis for any real or complex value of the spectral parameter λ. In the much more difficult intermediate cases, not all solutions contribute to the singular self-adjoint conditions. In 1986 Sun found a representation of the self-adjoint singular conditions in terms of certain solutions for nonreal values of λ. In this paper we give a representation in terms of certain solutions for real λ. This leads to a classification of solutions as limit-point (LP) or limit-circle (LC) in analogy with the celebrated Weyl classification in the second-order case. The LC solutions contribute to the singular boundary conditions, the LP solutions do not. The advantage of using real λ is not only because it is, in general, easier to find explicit solutions but, more importantly, it yields information about the spectrum.