Spectral asymptotics for nonsmooth singular Green operators

Abstract

Singular Green operators G appear typically as boundary correction terms in resolvents for elliptic boundary value problems on a domain \Omega \subset R^n, and more generally they appear in the calculus of pseudodifferential boundary problems. In particular, the boundary term in a Krein resolvent formula is a singular Green operator. It is well-known in smooth cases that when G is of negative order -t on a bounded domain, its eigenvalues or s-numbers have the behavior (*) s_j(G) \sim c j^{-t/(n-1)} for j\to \infty, governed by the boundary dimension n-1. In some nonsmooth cases, upper estimates (**) s_j(G) \le Cj^{-t/(n-1)} are known. We show that (*) holds when G is a general selfadjoint nonnegative singular Green operator with symbol merely H\"older continuous in x. We also show (*) with t=2 for the boundary term in the Krein resolvent formula comparing the Dirichlet and a Neumann-type problem for a strongly elliptic second-order differential operator (not necessarily selfadjoint) with coefficients in W^1_p(\Omega) for some p>n.