Weighted integral Hankel operators with continuous spectrum

Abstract Using the Kato-Rosenblum theorem, we describe the absolutely continuous spectrum of a class of weighted integral Hankel operators in L2(ℝ+). These self-adjoint operators generalise the explicitly diagonalisable operator with the integral kernel sαtα(s + t)-1-2α, where α > -1/2. Our analysis can be considered as an extension of J. Howland’s 1992 paper which dealt with the unweighted case, corresponding to α = 0.