Stability of the Derivative of a Canonical Product

With each sequence \(\alpha =(\alpha _n)_{n\in \mathbb{N }}\) of pairwise distinct and non-zero points which are such that the canonical product $$\begin{aligned} P_\alpha (z) := \lim _{r\rightarrow \infty }\prod _{|\alpha _n|\le r}\left( 1-\frac{z}{\alpha _n}\right) \end{aligned}$$ converges, the sequence $$\begin{aligned} \alpha ^{\prime } := \bigl (P_\alpha ^{\prime }(\alpha _n)\bigr )_{n\in \mathbb{N }} \end{aligned}$$ is associated. We give conditions on the difference \(\beta -\alpha \) of two sequences which ensure that \(\beta ^{\prime }\) and \(\alpha ^{\prime }\) are comparable in the sense that $$\begin{aligned} \exists \,c,C>0:\quad c|\alpha ^{\prime }_n| \le |\beta ^{\prime }_n| \le C|\alpha ^{\prime }_n|, \quad n\in \mathbb{N }. \end{aligned}$$ The values \(\alpha ^{\prime }_n\) play an important role in various contexts. As a selection of applications we present: an inverse spectral problem, a class of entire functions and a continuation problem.