Closure of the squared Zakharov-Shabat eigenstates

Abstract

By solving the inverse scattering problem for a third-order (degenerate) eigenvalue problem, we can find the closure of the squared eigenfunctions of the Zakharov-Shabat equations. The question of the completeness of squared eigenstates occurs in many aspects of “inverse scattering transforms” (solving nonlinear evolution equations exactly by inverse scattering techniques) as well as in various aspects of the inverse scattering problem. The method we use is quite suggestive as to how one might find the closure of the squared eigenfunctions of other eigenvalue equations, and we point the strong analogy between our results and the problem of finding the closure of the eigenvectors of a nonself-adjoint matrix.