Estimates for the Weyl coefficient of a two-dimensional canonical system

Abstract

For a two-dimensional canonical system $y^{\prime }(t)=zJH(t)y(t)$ on some interval $(a,b)$ whose Hamiltonian $H$ is a.e. positive semi-definite and which is regular at $a$ and in the limit point case at $b$, denote by $q_H$ its Weyl coefficient. De Branges' inverse spectral theorem states that the assignment $H\mapsto q_H$ is a bijection between Hamiltonians (suitably normalised) and Nevanlinna functions. We give upper and lower bounds for $|q_H(z)|$ and $\mathrm{Im}{q}_H(z)$ when $z$ tends to $i\infty$ non-tangentially. These bounds depend on the Hamiltonian $H$ near the left endpoint $a$ and determine $|q_H(z)|$ up to universal multiplicative constants. We obtain that the growth of $|q_H(z)|$ is independent of the off-diagonal entries of $H$ and depends monotonically on the diagonal entries in a natural way. The imaginary part is, in general, not fully determined by our bounds (in forthcoming work we shall prove that for "most" Hamiltonians also $\mathrm{Im}{q}_H(z)$ is fully determined). We translate the asymptotic behaviour of $q_H$ to the behaviour of the spectral measure ${\mu }_H$ of $H$ by means of Abelian--Tauberian results and obtain conditions for membership of growth classes defined by weighted integrability condition (Kac classes) or by boundedness of tails at $\pm \infty$ w.r.t. a weight function. Moreover, we apply our results to Krein strings and Sturm--Liouville equations.