The Sturm-Liouville operator satisfies the Lagrange identity for a Sturm-Liouville operator
Indeed 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 . Therefore
This 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, choose
The orthogonality condition then gives
With , where the correction remains bounded as , the normalization gives
Divide by and use to obtain
The positive quartic integral determines the leading direction of the nonlinear shift from the linear eigenvalue.