- Dissertation
- 10.31390/gradschool_disstheses.1578
Commutative Symmetric Rings and Their Applications to Spectral Multiplicity.
- Jan 01, 1969
- Robert Butts
Weakly closed, commutative, symmetric rings of operators on a Hilbert space are examined and their structure is ex ploited to characterize normal operators in terms of the rings they generate. In the first chapter, notation is established, and the less common theorems from Hilbert space theory not to be used in later sections are briefly reviewed. In Chapter II, the structure of weakly closed, commu tative, symmetric rings with a cyclic vector is specified. This theorem is then used in conjunction with a strucure called a canonical decomposition system to establish that every weakly closed, commutative, symmetric ring or opera tors acting on a separable space and containing the iden tity is spatially isomorphic to a "divect sum" of L rings of a certain type. In Chapter III, two sets of necessary and sufficient conditions are given for two normal operators on a separ able Hilbert space to be unitarily equivalent. The concept of a spectral class of a normal operator is introduced -a natural generalization of the concept of an eigen value. Each spectral class is assigned a multiplicity, and it is shown that two normal operators are unitarily equivalent iff they have the same spectral classes with the same respective multiplicities. A multiplicity is iv also defined for weakly continuous positive functionals o n the symmetric ring generated by a normal operator in the weak topology, and it is shown that this multiplicity function determines the operator. This multiplicity theory is compared w i t h a previous theory. v CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION We shall be concerned in this paper with rings of operators on a Hilbert space, in particular, weakly closed, commutative, symmetric rings. All Hilbert spaces to be considered will be complex Hilbert spaces. If H is a Hilbert space and x,y e H, then (x(y) will denote the inner product of x and y, and 1 Jxi| will denote the norm of x. We shall consider only bounded linear operators in this paper, and therefore we shall use the word "operator" solely to mean a bounded linear operator. The set of all operators on the Hilbert space H will be denoted by B(H). If A s B(H), then A* will denote the adjoint of A, We employ the usual concepts of isometric, unitary, hermitian, normal, and positive definite operators. Knowledge of the weak, strong, strongest, and norm topologies for B(H) is assumed. The norm topology is the strongest of the four; hence, any set of operators closed in one of the topologies is closed in the norm topology. By a ring of operators we shall mean a set of opera tors forming a ring in the usual algebraic sense which is also a vector space over the complex numbers. A ring R of operators is symmetric if A e R whenever A e R. from the theory of Banach algebras, we know that any norm closed, 1 we define an operator A a e BCLg) by A ftf = af* Note that two Ly,, functions which differ only on a set of measure zero give rise to the same operator. The ring of operators thus obtained is a maximal, commutative, symmetric ring. If E is a weakly closed, commutative, symmetric ring with maximal ideal space M, then the fact that E is closed under sups gives rise to some strong topological properties of M. In this case, M is totally disconnected, and the closure of every open set is open. Thus, M contains many sets which are both open and closed, and such sets we call clopen. It is easy to see that projections in E correspond v i a the Gelfand transform to the characteristic functions of clopen sets. If U is a clopen subset of M, then we will let pu denote the corresponding projection in E. pu (m) -JtjjCm) = the characteristic function of U. Throughout the remainder of this discussion, E will denote a weakly closed commutative, symmetric subring of B(H) with identity, and M will denote the maximal ideal space of E. Corresponding to each vector 5 e H, there is a measure u on M defined by The topological properties of M carry strong implications for the resulting measure space. If S = M is measurable, then there exists a clopen set U such that m (S\UUU\S) * 0. If ? is cyclic for E ' , then u is supported on all of M, in ( A $ 0 = J A (m)du(m)
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