Measure-geometric Laplacians on the real line

Abstract

Motivated by the fundamental theorem of calculus, and based on the works of Feller as well as Kac and Kre\u{\i}n, given an atomless Borel probability measure $\eta$ supported on a compact subset of $\mathbb{R}$, Freiberg and Z\"{a}hle introduced a measure-geometric approach to define a first order differential operator $\nabla_{\eta}$ and a second order differential operator $\Delta_{\eta}$, with respect to $\eta$. We generalise this approach to measures of the form $\eta = \nu + \delta$, where $\nu$ is continuous and $\delta$ is finitely supported. We determine analytic properties of $\nabla_{\eta}$ and $\Delta_{\eta}$ and show that $\Delta_{\eta}$ is a densely defined, unbounded, linear, self-adjoint operator with compact resolvent. Moreover, we give a systematic way to calculate the eigenvalues and eigenfunctions of $\Delta_{\eta}$. For two leading examples, we determine the eigenvalues and the eigenfunctions, as well as the asymptotic growth rates of the eigenvalue counting function.