Hyponormal and strongly hyponormal matrices in inner product spaces (Q989044)

The authors consider \(\mathbb C^n\) equipped with a possibly degenerate inner product \([\cdot,\cdot]\) (i.e., a reflexive Hermitian sesquilinear form). Their approach is in terms of the standard unitary dot product \((\cdot,\cdot)\) and the uniquely determined matrix \(H\in\mathbb C^{n\times n}\) satisfying the identity \([x,y]=(Hx,y)\). As \(H\) need not be invertible, the usual definition of the \(H\)-adjoint of a matrix \(T\in\mathbb C^{n\times n}\) (linear mapping \(\mathbb C^{n}\to \mathbb C^{n}\)) fails to make sense. In order to overcome this problem the \(H\)-adjoint of \(T\) is defined to be a \textit{linear relation} \(\mathbb C^{n}\to \mathbb C^{n}\), i.e., a subspace of \(\mathbb C^{n}\times\mathbb C^{n}\). More generally, the \(H\)-adjoint of any linear relation \(T:\mathbb C^{n}\to \mathbb C^{n}\) can be defined in a natural way as to be linear relation \(T^{[*]}: \mathbb C^{n}\to \mathbb C^{n}\). The main objective of the present paper is to extend the notion of \textit{\(H\)-hyponormality} to the case of degenerate inner product spaces. The straightforward approach to define \(H\)-hyponormality, i.e., calling a matrix \(T\) \(H\)-hyponormal if \(H(T^{[*]}T-TT^{[*]})\geq 0\) turns out to be unsatisfactory. Therefore, the new concept of \textit{strong \(H\)-hyponormality} is developed by adding the extra condition that \((T^{[*]})^i T^i\) should have domain \(\mathbb C^{n}\) for all \(i=1,2,\ldots\). The set of strongly \(H\)-hyponormal matrices has three essential properties: (i) it contains the set of \(H\)-normal and Moore-Penrose \(H\)-normal matrices; (ii) it equals the set of \(H\)-normal matrices when \(H\) is negative semidefinite; (iii) any strongly \(H\)-normal matrix has an invariant \(H\)-neutral subspace containing the kernel of \(H\).