Zero-product preserving additive maps on symmetric operator spaces and self-adjoint operator spaces (Q1772733)

Let~\(H\) be an infinite-dimensional, complex Hilbert space with a fixed orthonormal basis~\(\bigl(e_\lambda\bigr)_\lambda\). Given \(T\in{\mathcal B}(H)\), denote by \(T^\ast\) its adjoint and by \(T^t:=JT^\ast J\) its transpose, relative to a basis~\(\bigl(e_\lambda\bigr)_\lambda\). Here, \(J:x=\sum\langle x,e_\lambda\rangle\,e_\lambda\mapsto \overline{x}:=\sum\overline{\langle x,e_\lambda\rangle}e_\lambda\). The transpose is usually used to describe linear anti-isomorphisms of~\({\mathcal B}(H)\). The authors of the paper under review study additive surjections on the set \({\mathcal S}^y(H):=\{T\in{\mathcal B}(H):\;\;T^t=T\}\) which preserve zero-products in both directions. Specifically, the following is proved: Suppose that \(H,K\) are infinite-dimensional, complex Hilbert spaces, and \(\Phi: {\mathcal S}^y(H)\to{\mathcal S}^y(K)\) is an additive surjection with the property \[ ST=0\Longleftrightarrow\Phi(S)\Phi(T)=0\quad\text{ for }\quad S,T\in{\mathcal S}^y(H).\eqno{(1)} \] Then \(\Phi(T)=c\,ATA^{t}=c\,ATA^{-1}\), where~\(A:H\to H\) is invertible, bounded, linear or conjugate-linear, and~\(c\) is a nonzero complex number. A similar result is also obtained for additive surjections on the space of self-adjoint operators. In addition, it is shown that on the space of self-adjoint operators, condition~(1) can be replaced by \(ST+TS=0\Longleftrightarrow\Phi(S)\Phi(T)+\Phi(T)\Phi(S)=0\).