In this note semi-bounded self-adjoint extensions of symmetric operators are investigated with the help of the abstract notion of quasi boundary triples and their Weyl functions. The main purpose is to provide new sufficient conditions on the parameters in the boundary space to induce self-adjoint realizations, and to relate the decay of the Weyl function to estimates on the lower bound of the spectrum. The abstract results are illustrated with uniformly elliptic second-order partial differential equations on domains with non-compact boundaries.

The matrix KdV equation with a negative dispersion term is considered in the right upperquarter–plane. The evolution law is derived for the Weyl function of a correspondingauxiliary linear system. Using the low energy asymptotics of the Weyl functions, theunboundedness of solutions is obtained for some classes of the initial–boundaryconditions.

A general theorem on the GBDT version of the Bäcklund-Darboux transformation for systemsdepending rationally on the spectral parameter is treated and its applications tononlinear equations are given. Explicit solutions of direct and inverse problems forDirac-type systems, including systems with singularities, and for the system auxiliary tothe N-wave equation are reviewed. New results on explicit construction ofthe wave functions for radial Dirac equation are obtained.

It has long been known that a number of periodic completely integrable systems are associated to hyperelliptic curves, for which the Abel map linearizes the flow (at least in part). We show that this is true for a relatively recent such system: the periodic discrete reduction of the shallow water equation derived by Camassa and Holm. The associated spectral problem has the same form and evolves in the same way as the spectral problem for a family of finite-dimensional non-periodic Hamiltonian flows introduced by Calogero and Françoise. We adapt the Weyl function method used earlier by us to solve the peakon problem to give an explicit solution to both the periodic discrete Camassa–Holm system and the (non-periodic) Calogero–Françoise system in terms of theta functions.

AMS 2000 Mathematics subject classification: Primary 35Q51; 37J35; 35Q53