Past exam of the mathematics course of the University of Cambridge / 2007 / ib / Paper 2 / 15D (Methods)

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 $[0,1]$. The common Dirichlet boundary conditions make the endpoint term zero, while $L(y_0;{\lambda }_0)=0$. 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 $y=ϵy_0+{ϵ}^2{y}_1$, where the correction remains bounded as $ϵ\to 0$, the normalization givesDivide by ${ϵ}^3$ and use $\mu =O(1)$ to obtainThe positive quartic integral determines the leading direction of the nonlinear shift from the linear eigenvalue.