Virtual levels, also known as threshold resonances, admit several equivalent characterizations: (1) there are corresponding virtual states from a space slightly weaker than L 2 ; (2) there is no limiting absorption principle in their vicinity (e.g. no weights such that the "sandwiched" resolvent is uniformly bounded); (3) an arbitrarily small perturbation can produce an eigenvalue. We develop a general approach to virtual levels in Banach spaces and provide applications to Schrödinger operators with nonselfadjoint potentials and in any dimension.Let X be an infinite-dimensional complex Banach space and A ∈ C (X) a closed linear operator with dense domain D(A) ⊂ X. We say that λ ∈ σ p (A), the point spectrum, if there is ψ ∈ D(A) \ {0} such that (A − λI)ψ = 0, and λ ∈ σ d (A), the discrete spectrum, if it is an isolated point in σ(A) and A − λI is a Fredholm operator, or, equivalently, if the corresponding Riesz projection is of finite rank (λ is a normal eigenvalue in the terminology of [GK57]). We define the essential spectrum by(2.1) Let us mention that, according to [HL07, Appendix B] (see also [BC19, Theorem III.125]), the definition (2.1) of the essential spectrum coincides with σ ess,5 (A) from [EE18, §I.4]. Remark 2.1. In [EE18, §I.4], there are five different types of the essential spectra:where σ ess,1 (A) is defined as z ∈ σ(A) such that either R(A − zI) is not closed or both ker(A − zI) and coker(A − zI) = X/R(A − zI) are infinite-dimensional (this definition of the essential spectrum was used by T. Kato in [Kat95]). The spectrum σ ess,2 (A) is the set of points z ∈ σ(A) such that A − zI either has infinite-dimensional kernel or or has the range which is not closed; σ ess,3 (A) and σ ess,4 (A) are, respectively, the sets of points z ∈ σ(A) such that A − zI is not Fredholm and such that A − zI is not Fredholm of index zero. The spectrum σ ess,5 (A) is defined as the union of σ ess,1 (A) with the connected components of C \ σ ess,1 (A) which do not intersect the resolvent set of A (this definition of the essential spectrum used by F. Browder in [Bro61, Definition 11]). If the essential spectrum σ ess,5 (A) does not contain open subsets of C, then all the essential spectra σ ess,k (A), 1 ≤ k ≤ 5, coincide. For more details, see [EE18, §I.4]. We remind that, by the Weyl theorem (see [EE18, Theorem IX.2.1]), the essential spectra σ ess,k (A), 1 ≤ k ≤ 4, remain invariant with respect to relatively compact perturbations, but this is not necessarily so for σ ess,5 (A).
♦Definition 2.2. Let X be a Banach space. Assume that A ∈ C (X) is densely defined. Let Ω ⊂ C \ σ(A) be a connected open set. We say that a point z 0 ∈ σ ess (A) ∩ ∂Ω is a point of the essential spectrum relative to Ω of rank r ∈ N 0 if r is the smallest value for which there are Banach spaces E, F with dense continuous embeddings.2) is closable, with closure  ∈ C (F), and if there is an operator B ∈ B 00 (F, E) of rank r and δ > 0 such that Ω ∩ σ(A + B) ∩ D δ (z 0 ) = ∅, and there exists a weak limit (A + B − z 0 I) −1 Ω := w-lim z→z 0 , z∈Ω (...