Plummeting and blinking eigenvalues of the Robin Laplacian in a cuspidal domain

Abstract: We consider the Robin Laplacian in the domains $\Omega$ and $\Omega^\varepsilon$, $\varepsilon >0$, with sharp and blunted cusps, respectively. Assuming that the Robin coefficient $a$ is large enough, the spectrum of the problem in $\Omega$ is known to be residual and to cover the whole complex plane, but on the contrary, the spectrum in the Lipschitz domain $\Omega^\varepsilon$ is discrete. However, our results reveal the strange behavior of the discrete spectrum as the blunting parameter $\varepsilon$ tends to 0: we construct asymptotic forms of the eigenvalues and detect families of "hardly movable" and "plummeting" ones. The first type of the eigenvalues do not leave a small neighborhood of a point for any small $\varepsilon > 0$ while the second ones move at a high rate $O(|\ln \varepsilon|)$ downwards along the real axis $\mathbb{R}$ to $ -\infty$. At the same time, any point $\lambda \in \mathbb{R}$ is a "blinking eigenvalue", i.e., it belongs to the spectrum of the problem in $\Omega^\varepsilon$ almost periodically in the $|\ln \varepsilon|$-scale. Besides standard spectral theory, we use the techniques of dimension reduction and self-adjoint extensions to obtain these results.