Fredholm Differential Operators with Unbounded Coefficients

Abstract

We prove that a first order linear differential operator G with unbounded operator coefficients is Fredholm on spaces of functions on the real line with values in a reflexive Banach space if and only if the corresponding strongly continuous evolution family has exponential dichotomies on both semiaxises and a pair of the ranges of the dichotomy projections is Fredholm, and that the Fredholm index of G is equal to the Fredholm index of the pair. The operator G is the generator of the evolution semigroup associated with the evolution family. In the case when the evolution family is the propagator of a well-posed differential equation u'(t)=A(t)u(t) with, generally, unbounded operators A(t), the operator G is a closure of the operator -d/dt+A(t). Thus, this paper provides a complete infinite dimensional generalization of well-known finite dimensional results by K. Palmer, and by A. Ben-Artzi and I. Gohberg.