Hearing the shape of a quantum boundary condition

Abstract

We study the isospectrality problem for a free quantum particle confined in a ring with a junction, analyzing all the self-adjoint realizations of the corresponding Hamiltonian in terms of a boundary condition at the junction. In particular, by characterizing the energy spectrum in terms of a spectral function, we classify the self-adjoint realizations in two classes, identifying all the families of isospectral Hamiltonians. These two classes turn out to be discerned by the action of parity (i.e. space reflection), which plays a central role in our discussion.