Abstract (eng)
The Camassa-Holm equation is an integrable, non-linear partial differential equation which models waves on shallow water. Associated with this equation is a weighted Sturm-Liouville problem on the real line; the isospectral problem. In order to incorporate the main interesting phenomena (wave breaking and peakon solutions) of the dispersionless Camassa-Holm equation, one has to allow this weight to be an arbitrary finite signed Borel measure. The main difficulties arising hereby are that both endpoints are quite singular and that the weight is just a finite measure, allowed to vanish on arbitrary sets and moreover, to change sign. In the present thesis we are concerned with direct and inverse spectral theory of Sturm-Liouville operators of this kind. First, we introduce self-adjoint operators associated with general Sturm-Liouville problems with measure coefficients and develop singular Weyl-Titchmarsh theory for such operators. This is done in both, the right-definite and in the left-definite setting. Regarding inverse spectral theory, first of all we prove some uniqueness results for Schrödinger operators with potentials, which are singular at both endpoints. In particular, we show when the spectral measure uniquely determines the potential and prove a Hochstadt-Lieberman type uniqueness result. Subsequently, we prove a quite general inverse uniqueness theorem for Sturm-Liouville operators with measure coefficients in the left-definite setting. Finally, these results are applied to the isospectral problem of the Camassa-Holm equation. In particular, this shows that the associated spectral measure uniquely determines the finite signed measure appearing in this weighted Sturm-Liouville problem.