Past exam of the mathematics course of the University of Cambridge 2007 ib Paper 2 15D Solution Created 2026-09-24 Updated 2026-10-14
The Sturm-Liouville operator satisfies the Lagrange identity for a Sturm-Liouville operatorIndeed the potential terms cancel, and differentiating the right side gives the remaining two derivative terms. Integrate over . The common Dirichlet boundary conditions make the endpoint term zero, while . ThereforeThis is the necessary solvability condition imposed by the nonzero homogeneous solution; its proof here does not rely on merely quoting the Fredholm alternative.
For the nonlinear problem, chooseThe orthogonality condition then givesWith , where the correction remains bounded as , the normalization givesDivide by and use to obtainThe positive quartic integral determines the leading direction of the nonlinear shift from the linear eigenvalue.