Unbounded symbols, heat flow, and Toeplitz operators
Abstract
We disprove the natural domain extension of the Berger--Coburn heat-flow conjecture for Toeplitz operators on the Bargmann space and identify the failure mechanism as a gap between pointwise and uniform control of a Gaussian averaging of the squared modulus of the symbol, a gap that is invisible to the linear form . We establish that the form-defined operator and the natural-domain operator decouple in the unbounded symbols regime: while is governed by linear averaging, is controlled by the quadratic intensity of . We construct a smooth, nonnegative radial symbol satisfying the coherent-state admissibility hypothesis with bounded heat transforms for all time ; for this symbol, is bounded, yet is unbounded. This is a strictly global phenomenon: under the coherent-state hypothesis, local singularities are insufficient to cause unboundedness, leaving the ``geometry at infinity'' as the sole obstruction. Boundedness of is equivalent to the condition that is a Fock--Carleson measure, a condition strictly stronger than the linear average governing . Finally, regarding the gap between the known sub-critical sufficiency condition and the critical heat time, we prove that heat-flow regularity is irreversible in this context and show that bootstrapping strategies cannot resolve the gap between sufficiency and critical time.
Cite
@article{arxiv.2601.10711,
title = {Unbounded symbols, heat flow, and Toeplitz operators},
author = {Sam Looi},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2601.10711},
year = {2026}
}