Boundary Triples and Weyl $m$-functions for Powers of the Jacobi Differential Operator

Abstract: The abstract theory of boundary triples is applied to the classical Jacobi differential operator and its powers in order to obtain the Weyl $m$-function for several self-adjoint extensions with interesting boundary conditions: separated, periodic and those that yield the Friedrichs extension. These matrix-valued Nevanlinna--Herglotz $m$-functions are, to the best knowledge of the author, the first explicit examples to stem from singular higher-order differential equations. The creation of the boundary triples involves taking pieces, determined in a previous paper, of the principal and non-principal solutions of the differential equation and putting them into the sesquilinear form to yield maps from the maximal domain to the boundary space. These maps act like quasi-derivatives, which are usually not well-defined for all functions in the maximal domain of singular expressions. However, well-defined regularizations of quasi-derivatives are produced by putting the pieces of the non-principal solutions through a modified Gram--Schmidt process.