Degenerate Boundary Conditions for the Diffusion Operator on a Geometric Graph

We study boundary conditions for the diffusion operator defined on a star-shaped geometric graph consisting of three edges with a common vertex. We show that if the edge lengths are pairwise distinct, then there do not exist degenerate boundary conditions for the diffusion operator. If the edge lengths coincide and the potentials are symmetric, then the characteristic determinant of a boundary value problem for the diffusion operator cannot be a constant other than zero, and the set of boundary value problems for which the characteristic determinant is identically zero is infinite (a continuum). We show that, for the diffusion operator on the star-shaped graph, the set of boundary value problems whose spectrum fills the entire plane consists of eighteen classes, each of which contains eight to nine arbitrary constants. Recall that for the diffusion operator defined on an interval this set consists of two problems.