Nodal deficiency, spectral flow, and the Dirichlet-to-Neumann map

Abstract: It was recently shown that the nodal deficiency of an eigenfunction is encoded in the spectrum of the Dirichlet-to-Neumann operators for the eigenfunction's positive and negative nodal domains. While originally derived using symplectic methods, this result can also be understood through the spectral flow for a family of boundary conditions imposed on the nodal set, or, equivalently, a family of operators with delta function potentials supported on the nodal set. In this paper we explicitly describe this flow for a Schr\"odinger operator with separable potential on a rectangular domain, and determine a mechanism by which lower energy eigenfunctions do or do not contribute to the nodal deficiency.