ISRN Mathematical Analysis

Volume 2014 (2014), Article ID 246301, 4 pages

http://dx.doi.org/10.1155/2014/246301

Research Article

A Formula for the Numerical Range of Elementary Operators

M. Barraa

Department of Mathematics, Faculty of Sciences Semlalia, Marrakech, Morocco

Received 10 November 2013; Accepted 9 February 2014; Published 20 March 2014

Academic Editors: M. Lindstrom and C. Zhu

Copyright © 2014 M. Barraa. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Abstract.

Let be the algebra of bounded linear operators on a complex Hilbert space . For -tuples of elements of and , let denote the elementary operator on defined by . In this paper, we prove the following formula for the numerical range of : , where is the set of unitary operators.

1. Introduction

Let be a complex Banach algebra with unit. For -tuples of elements of , and , let denote the elementary operator on defined by

This is a bounded linear operator on . Some interesting cases are the generalized derivation and the multiplication for .

The numerical range of is defined by

where is the set of normalized states in :

See [1–3]. It is well known that is convex and closed and contains the spectrum . For , the algebra of bounded linear operators on a normed space , and , in addition to , we have the spatial numerical range of , given by

and it is known that , the closed convex hull of . In the case of a Hilbert space , then

is convex but not closed in general and .

Many facts about the relation between the spectrum of and the spectrums of the coefficients and are known. This is not the case with the relation between the numerical range of and the numerical ranges of and . Apparently, the only elementary operator on a Hilbert space for which the numerical range is computed is the generalized derivations [4–8]. It is Fong [4] who first gives the following formula:

where is the inner derivation defined by . Shaw [7] (see also [5, 6]) extended this formula to generalized derivations in Banach spaces. For a good survey of the numerical range of elementary operators, you can see [9], where the following problem is posed.

Problem. Determine the numerical range of the elementary operator .

In this paper, we give a formula that answers this problem.

2. Main Result

The following theorem is the main result in this paper.

Theorem 1. Let be a complex Hilbert space. Let and be two -tuples of elements in . Then, one has

In particular for multiplication and generalized derivation, one has :

From Fong’s formula (see [4, 6, 10]), we can deduce the following.

Corollary 2. For , one has

3. Proof of the Main Result

One of the keys to the proof of our main result is the following lemma.

Lemma 3. Let and be two -tuples of elements in . Then, one has

In particular, for , one has

Proof. Let ; by definition, there exists with such that

Here, is the linear form trace. Let be the linear form defined by

This is a bounded linear form on , with norm being equal to 1, because

Since

the form is a state on . So,

Hence, .

Let be a Banach space. We say that is an isometry if for all . If is an invertible isometry, then its inverse is also an isometry, and we have

In the case of a Hilbert space, an invertible isometry is unitary and its inverse is the adjoint.

Let and be two unitaries operators on ; then

with being an invertible isometry and its inverse being   .

From this result, we deduce that

Now, using Lemma 3, we get

But, the numerical range is closed and the product of two unitaries is also an unitary, hence:

So, we have proved the second inclusion of Theorem 1.

For the other inclusion, we will use the two following theorems.

Theorem 4 (See [11]). Let be Banach algebra. For , one has

The norm of an elementary operator is defined by

Let be -algebra. An element is said to be unitary if . In the following, denote the set of unitaries in .

Theorem 5 (Russo-Dye [12]). Let be algebra. Let and be two -tuples of elements in . Then, one has

We return now to the proof of the main theorem.

Proof. We need only to show the inclusion “” By Theorem 4, we have

And, by Theorem 5, we get

But for all and . Hence,

Hence, if , then, for all ,

Let fixed, there exists a unitary such that

Now, using Theorem 4, we have

So, there exists such that . But is arbitrary, . This finishes the proof of the main theorem.

4. Some Applications

It is well known that, for the spectrum, if , then we have

For the numerical range, this not true, but we can deduce the following corollary from the proof of Theorem 1.

Corollary 6. For all , one has

The numerical radius of an operator is denoted by and defined by

Corollary 7. Let and be two -tuples of elements in . Then, one has

In particular, for ,

Let be a nonempty subset of the plane and let

From Corollary 7 (), one has

So, the diameter of the numerical range is equal to the diameter of the -unitary orbit of the operator .

Conflict of Interests

The author declares that there is no conflict of interests regarding the publication of this paper.

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