On the spectral instability of the Sturm-Liouville operator with a complex potential

Using the Sturm-Liouville operator with a complex potential as an example, we analyze the spectral instability effect for operators that are far from being self-adjoint. We show that the addition of an arbitrarily small compactly supported function with an arbitrarily small support to the potential can substantially change the asymptotics of the spectrum. This fact justifies, in a sense, the necessity of well-known sufficient conditions for the potential under which the spectrum of the operator is localized around some ray. For an operator with a logarithmic growth, we construct a perturbation that preserves the asymptotics of the spectrum but has infinitely many poles inside the main sector.