A closer look at Bishop operators (Q1980917)

This paper is an essentially self-contained survey of what is, as of today, known and unknown concerning the so-called Bishop operators on the spaces \(L^{p}[0,1)\), \(1\le p<\infty\). These are the operators \(T_{\alpha }\) defined by \[ T_{\alpha }f:t\longmapsto tf(\{t+\alpha \}),\quad f\in L^{p}[0,1), \] where \(\alpha \in(0,1)\) and \(\{x\}\) denotes the fractional part of \(x\in\mathbb{R}\). The interest in these operators stems from the fact that they are very far from being completely understood. In particular, although it was shown by \textit{A. M. Davie} [Bull. Lond. Math. Soc. 6, 343--348 (1974; Zbl 0287.47003)] that \(T_{\alpha }\) acting on \(L^{p}[0,1)\) admits a non-trivial closed invariant subspace whenever \(\alpha \) is a non-Liouville irrational number on \((0,1)\), it is still unknown whether \(T_{\alpha }\) admits a non-trivial invariant subspace for every \(\alpha \in(0,1)\). \par\smallskip In this paper, the authors survey recent methods providing non-trivial invariant subspaces for \(T_{\alpha }\), for \(\alpha \) belonging to a large class of irrationals including many Liouville numbers. They explore the limits of the approach by functional calculus, initiated by Davie and formalized later on by \textit{A. Atzmon} [J. Oper. Theory 11, 3--40 (1984; Zbl 0583.47009)], and then present a study of local spectral properties and spectral invariant subspaces (when they do exist) of Bishop operators. In the last section of the paper, they discuss analogous results for Bishop-type operators. \par\smallskip All the original results presented in this survey come from the papers [\textit{F. Chamizo} et al., Adv. Math. 375, Article ID 107365, 25 p. (2020; Zbl 1494.47009); \textit{E. A. Gallardo-Gutiérrez} and \textit{M. Monsalve-López}, ``Power-regular Bishop operators and spectral decompositions'', J. Oper. Theory 85, No. 2, 403--416 (2021; \url{doi:10.7900/jot.2019sep21.2256}); Integral Equations Oper. Theory 93, No. 1, Paper No. 6, 22 p. (2021; Zbl 1486.47013)]. For the entire collection see [Zbl 1471.47002].