The Riesz Basis Property of an Indefinite Sturm-Liouville Problem with a Non-Odd Weight Function

For the Sturm-Liouville eigenvalue problem − f′′ = λrf on −1, 1] with Dirichlet boundary conditions and with an indefinite weight function r changing its sign at 0 we discuss the question whether the eigenfunctions form a Riesz basis of the Hilbert space L ² _|r|− 1, 1]. So far a number of sufficient conditions on r for the Riesz basis property are known. However, a sufficient and necessary condition is only known in the special case of an odd weight function r. We shall here give a generalization of this sufficient and necessary condition for certain generally non-odd weight functions satisfying an additional assumption.