English

The spectral theorem for unitary operators based on the $S$-spectrum

Spectral Theory 2014-03-04 v1 Functional Analysis

Abstract

The quaternionic spectral theorem has already been considered in the literature, see e.g. [22], [31], [32], however, except for the finite dimensional case in which the notion of spectrum is associated to an eigenvalue problem, see [21], it is not specified which notion of spectrum underlies the theorem. In this paper we prove the quaternionic spectral theorem for unitary operators using the SS-spectrum. In the case of quaternionic matrices, the SS-spectrum coincides with the right-spectrum and so our result recovers the well known theorem for matrices. The notion of SS-spectrum is relatively new, see [17], and has been used for quaternionic linear operators, as well as for nn-tuples of not necessarily commuting operators, to define and study a noncommutative versions of the Riesz-Dunford functional calculus. The main tools to prove the spectral theorem for unitary operators are the quaternionic version of Herglotz's theorem, which relies on the new notion of qq-positive measure, and quaternionic spectral measures, which are related to the quaternionic Riesz projectors defined by means of the SS-resolvent operator and the SS-spectrum. The results in this paper restore the analogy with the complex case in which the classical notion of spectrum appears in the Riesz-Dunford functional calculus as well as in the spectral theorem.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1403.0175,
  title  = {The spectral theorem for unitary operators based on the $S$-spectrum},
  author = {D. Alpay and F. Colombo and D. P. Kimsey and I. Sabadini},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1403.0175},
  year   = {2014}
}
R2 v1 2026-06-22T03:18:30.510Z