The Borg-Marchenko Theorem with a Continuous Spectrum

Abstract

The Schrödinger equation is considered on the half line with a selfadjoint boundary condition when the potential is real valued, integrable, and has a finite first moment. It is proved that the potential and the two boundary conditions are uniquely determined by a set of spectral data containing the discrete eigenvalues for a boundary condition at the origin, the continuous part of the spectral measure for that boundary condition, and a subset of the discrete eigenvalues for a different boundary condition. This result provides a generalization of the celebrated uniqueness theorem of Borg and Marchenko using two sets of discrete spectra to the case where there is also a continuous spectrum. The proof employed yields a method to recover the potential and the two boundary conditions, and it also constructs data sets used in various inversion methods. A comparison is made with the uniqueness result of Gesztesy and Simon using Krein's spectral shift function as the inversion data.