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The Kerzman-Stein operator for piecewise continuously differentiable regions

The Kerzman-Stein operator is the skew-hermitian part of the Cauchy operator defined with respect to an unweighted hermitian inner product on a rectifiable curve. If the curve is continuously differentiable, the Kerzman-Stein operator is compact on the Hilbert space of square integrable functions; when there is a corner, the operator is noncompact. Here we give a complete description of the spectrum for a finite symmetric wedge and we show how this reveals the essential spectrum for curves that are piecewise continuously differentiable. We also give an explicit construction for a smooth curve whose Kerzman-Stein operator has large norm, and we demonstrate the variation in norm with respect to a continuously differentiable perturbation.