Perturbations of Polynomials with Operator Coefficients

We consider polynomials whose coefficients are operators belonging to the Schatten-von Neumann ideals of compact operators in a Hilbert space. Bounds for the spectra of perturbed pencils are established. Applications to differential and difference equations are also discussed. 1. Introduction and Preliminaries Numerous mathematical and physical problems lead to polynomial operator pencils (polynomials with operator coefficients); cf. [1] and references therein. Recently, the spectral theory of operator pencils attracts the attention of many mathematicians. In particular, in the paper [2], spectral properties of the quadratic operator pencil of Schr？dinger operators on the whole real axis are studied. The author of the paper [3] establishes sufficient conditions for the finiteness of the discrete spectrum of linear pencils. The paper [4] deals with the spectral analysis of a class of second-order indefinite nonself-adjoint differential operator pencils. In that paper, a method for solving the inverse spectral problem for the Schr？dinger operator with complex periodic potentials is proposed. In [5, 6], certain classes of analytic operator valued functions in a Hilbert space are studied, and bounds for the spectra of these functions are suggested. The results of papers [5, 6] are applied to second-order differential operators and functional differential equations. The paper [7] considers polynomial pencils whose coefficients are compact operators. Besides, inequalities for the sums of absolute values and real and imaginary parts of characteristic values are derived. The paper [8] is devoted to the variational theory of the spectra of operator pencils with self-adjoint operators. A Banach algebra associated with a linear operator pencil is explored in [9]. A functional calculus generated by a quadratic operator pencil is investigated in [10]. A quadratic pencil of differential operators with periodic generalized potential is considered in [11]. The fold completeness of a system of root vectors of a system of unbounded polynomial operator pencils in Banach spaces is explored in [12]. Certainly, we could not survey the whole subject here and refer the reader to the pointed papers and references cited therein. Note that perturbations of pencils with nonself-adjoint operator coefficients, to the best of our knowledge, were not investigated in the available literature, although in many applications, for example, in numerical mathematics and stability analysis, bounds for the spectra of perturbed pencils are very important; cf. [13]. In the present paper, we