Supercyclic subspaces: Spectral theory and weighted shifts (Q5949990)

This article constitutes an important contribution to the theory of supercyclic and hypercyclic operators on Banach spaces, and its applications to weighted shifts on classical Banach sequence spaces. It continues previous work by the authors and others, like Bourdon, M. González, León-Saavedra. An operator \(T\) on a Banach space \(X\) is called hypercyclic if there is a vector \(x \in X\) whose orbit \(O(T,x):=\{x,T(x),T^2(x),\dots \}\) is dense in \(X\), and it is called supercyclic if the set \(\{aT^n(x)\); \(a \in \mathbb{C}\), \(n \in \mathbb{N} \}\) is dense in \(X\). In these cases the vector \(x\) is called a hypercyclic or supercyclic vector for \(T\), respectively. The article starts with a good and informative introduction in Section 1. In Section 2, the authors present an equivalent formulation of the supercyclicity criterion of Salas which is easier to handle. As a consequence, they get a sufficient condition on unilateral and on bilateral weighted shifts on \(l_p\) and \(l_p(\mathbb{Z})\), respectively, to satisfy the supercyclicity criterion. In Section 3, they present a general sufficient condition (called \(B_0\)) on an operator which satisfies the supercyclicity criterion to ensure the existence of an infinite dimensional closed subspace \(X_1\) of \(X\) such that every non-zero vector in \(X_1\) is a supercyclic vector. This result is used in Section 4 to derive a condition on the spectrum of the operator \(T\) to ensure that \(T\) admits an infinite dimensional closed subspace of supercyclic vectors (except 0). In Section 7, an example is constructed to show that this spectral condition is not necessary. The results in Sections 2-4 show that operators which satisfy the supercyclic criterion share some properties with hypercyclic operators. Sections 5 and 6 test the results of the previous sections with weighted shifts. The main theorem of Section 5 states that a backward weighted shift on \(l_p, 1 \leq p < \infty\), has an infinite dimensional closed subspace of supercyclic operators if and only if it satisfies the supercyclicity criterion and the condition \(B_0\). These conditions are also characterized in terms of the weight sequence. The proof is long, complicated and it requires several new ideas. The results in Section 6 are parallel to those of the preceding section. However, new difficulties must be overcome in the case of bilateral weighted shifts on \(l_p(\mathbb{Z})\). A striking consequence is that there are supercyclic weighted shift operators such that all the closed subspaces of supercyclic vectors are finite dimensional. The following interesting results, which cannot be expected in the case of hypercyclic operators, are also included: (1) There is an invertible supercyclic operator \(T\) with an infinite dimensional closed subspace of supercyclic vectors such that all the closed subspaces of supercyclic vectors for the inverse of \(T\) are finite dimensional; (2) there is an invertible supercyclic operator on \(l_2(\mathbb{Z})\) with an infinite dimensional closed subspace of supercyclic vectors such that its adjoint \(T^{*}\) is supercyclic, but all the closed subspaces of supercyclic vectors of \(T^{*}\) are finite dimensional.