On Spectral Properties of Restricted Fractional Laplacians with Self-adjoint Boundary Conditions on a Finite Interval

Abstract: We describe all self-adjoint realizations of the restricted fractional Laplacian $(-\Delta)^a$ with power $a \in (\frac{1}{2}, 1)$ on a bounded interval by imposing boundary conditions on the functions in the domain of a maximal realization; such conditions relate suitable weighted Dirichlet and Neumann traces. This is done in a systematic way by using the abstract concept of boundary triplets and their Weyl functions from extension and spectral theory of symmetric and self-adjoint operators in Hilbert spaces. Our treatment follows closely the well-known one for classical Laplacians on intervals and it shows that all self-adjoint realizations have purely discrete spectrum and are semibounded from below. To demonstrate the method, we focus on three self-adjoint realizations of the restricted fractional Laplacian: the Friedrichs extension, corresponding to Dirichlet-type boundary conditions, the Krein--von Neumann extension, and a Neumann-type realization. Notably, the Neumann-type realization exhibits a simple negative eigenvalue, thus it is not larger than the Krein--von Neumann extension.