EN
We study a Sturm-Liouville problem containing a spectral parameter in the boundary conditions. We associate to this problem a self-adjoint operator in a Pontryagin space Π₁. Using this operator-theoretic formulation and analytic methods, we study the asymptotic behavior of the eigenvalues under the variation of a large physical parameter in the boundary conditions. The spectral analysis is applied to investigate the well-posedness and stability of the wave equation of a string.