Adnan A.S.

Jibril

ON n-POWER NORMAL OPERATORS

Adnan A.S. Jibril* Department of Mathematics and Statistics King Fahd University of Petroleum & Minerals Dhahran 31261, Saudi Arabia

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*To whom correspondence should be addressed. e-mail: jibril@kfupm.edu.sa Paper Received 16 March 2005; Revised 29 December 2007; Accepted 20 February 2008

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ABSTRACT We introduce the class of n-power normal operators, and prove that an operator T (T T L(H) is n-power normal if and only if T n is normal; if and only if nx = n)*(x) for all x H. We give some properties of these operators in general, and also study the special case when an operator is n-power normal for n = 2, 3. Key words: Operator, Hilbert Space, Uniform Closure, Adjoint, Invariant Subspace, 2-Normal Operator, Normal Operator

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ON n-POWER NORMAL OPERATORS

1. INTRODUCTION Let H be a complex Hilbert space and let L(H) be the algebra of all bounded linear operators on H. In [1], the author introduced the class of 2-normal operators: T L(H) is 2-normal if T 2 T = T T 2 . The class of all 2-normal operators is denoted by [2N ]. In this paper we introduce the class of n-power normal operators n 3 which we denote [nN ] for all positive integers n: T L(H) is n-power normal if T n T = T T n . In Section 2, we characterize and prove some general results about n-power normal operators. In Section 3, we show that the two classes [2N ] and [3N ] are independent and give some conditions under which an operator T [2N ] [3N ] becomes normal. 2. RESULTS In this section we prove some general results about n-power normal operators. Proposition 2.1. Let T L(H), then T [nN ] if and only if T n is normal for any positive integer n 1. Proof. If T n T = T T n , then T n (T )n = T T n (T )n1 , i.e. T n (T n ) = T T n T (T )n2 = (T n ) T n . If conversely T n is normal then T n T = T T n implies by Fuglede theorem that (T n ) T = T (T n ) , i.e. T T n = T nT .

Corollary 2.2. Let T L(H). Then T is n-power normal if and only if T n x = (T n ) x for all x H. Proof. The proof follows immediately from Proposition 2.1 and from ([2], p. 154). Corollary 2.3. The class [nN ] of n-power normal operators on H is closed under scalar multiplication, unitary equivalence, and taking adjoints. Moreover, the inverse, if it exists, and the restriction to a closed subspace of H of an n-power normal operator is n-power normal. Proof. Immediate from Proposition 2.1. Remark 2.4. Unitary equivalence in Corollary 2.2 cannot be replaced by similarity: The operators T = 1 0 1 1 0 0 0 1 and S = 0 0 1 1 acting on C 2 , are similar since S = X 1 T X where

X=

, but T is 3-normal and S is not.

Proposition 2.5. If T, F [nN ] and T n , F n commute, then T F [nN ].

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Proof. This follows immediately from Proposition 2.1 and Fuglede theorem. Corollary 2.6. If T [nN ], then T m [nN ] for any positive integer m.

Proof. The proof follows from Proposition 2.5 and by using induction. Remark 2.7. In Proposition 2.5, if T F = F T , then it is not necessary that T F [nN ]: The non-commuting operators S = ST [3N ]. In the following example we show that the sum of two commuting n-power normal operators is not necessarily n-power normal. Example 2.8. The operators T = but S + T [2n]. Clearly ST = T S. 0 0 1 0 and S = 1 0 0 1 acting on C 2 , are both 2-normal operators 1 0 0 2 and T = 1 1 1 0 acting on C 2 , are both in [3N ], but

3. THE CLASSES [2N ] AND [3N ] In this section we study the relation between the two classes [2N ] and [3N ]. The following two examples show that these classes are independent: Example 3.1. The operator T = 1 0 1 1 2 1 1 0 acting on C 2 , is 2-normal, but T [3N ].

Example 3.2. The operator T =

acting on C 2 is not 2-normal but T [3N ].

Proposition 3.3. If T [2N ] and T is a partial isometry as well, then T [3N ]. Proof. If T is a partial isometry, then (by [2], p. 153), T T T = T. Pre- and post-multiply the last equation by T to get T T 3 = T 3 T , i.e. T [3N ]. Proposition 3.4. Let T L(H) such that T [2N ] [3N ], then T [nN ] for all positive integers n 4. Proof. We prove the result by induction. First, we prove it for n = 4. Since T [2N ], T 2T = T T 2 Pre- and post-multiply (3.1) by T and use T 3 T = T T 3 to get T 2T T = T T T 2 (3.2)
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(3.1)

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Multiplying (3.2) on the left by T we get T 3T T = T 2T T 2 which implies that T T 4 = T 4 T . Now suppose the result is true for n > 4, i.e., suppose that T n T = T T n , then T n+1 T = T T T n = T T T 2 T n2 = T 3 T T n2 = T T 3 T n2 = T T n+1 . Thus T is (n + 1)-normal. The result now follows by induction.

It is easy to see that an operator in [2N ] [3N ] need not be normal; for example the operator We have however the following: Proposition 3.5. Let T [2N ] [3N ]. If ker T = ker T 2 (e.g. if T is one-to-one), then T is normal.

0 0

1 0

Proof. Since T [2N ] [3N ] and since ker T 2 = ker T , we have T T T = T T which implies that (T T T T )2 = 0. Since T T and T T are self-adjoint, T T T T = 0, i.e. T is normal. Remark 3.6. The unilateral shift is not 2-normal since the unilateral shift is quasinormal and if it were 2-normal then this implies ([1], Proposition 2.3, p. 193) that T is normal which is not true. Remark 3.7. Embry [3] has studied operators such that T 2 is normal and these have been completely characterized by Radjavi and Rosenthal [4]. REFERENCES
[1] A.A.S. Jibril, On 2-Normal Operators, Dirasat, 23 (1996). [2] S.K. Berberian, Introduction to Hilbert Spaces. New York: Chelsea Publishing Company, 1976. [3] Mary R. Embry, N -th Roots of Operators, Proc. Amer. Math. Soc., 19 (1968), pp. 6368. [4] Heydar Radjavi and Peter Rosenthal, On Roots of Normal Operators, J. Math. Anal. Appl., 24 (1971), pp. 653664.

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