Global symmetric approximation of frames (Q2003594)

The author studies the problem of best approximation by Parseval frames to an arbitrary frame in a subspace of an infinite dimensional Hilbert space. He explicitly describes all the solutions and gives a criterion for uniqueness. The proof relies on the geometric structure of the set of all Parseval frames quadratically close to a given frame. In doing so, he shows that its connected components can be parametrized by using the notion of index of a pair of projections and obtains existence and uniqueness results of best approximation by Parseval frames restricted to these connected components. The paper is organized as follows: Section 1 is an introduction in which the author recalls some basic definitions. These include the method of symmetric approximation of frames to approximate arbitrary frames by Parseval frames. This method was introduced by \textit{M. Frank} et al. [Trans. Am. Math. Soc. 354, No. 2, 777--793 (2002; Zbl 0984.42021)] motivated by the Löwdin orthogonalization method in quantum chemistry, which approximates an arbitrary basis by an orthonormal basis. This introduction also discusses in detail the problems discussed in the paper and the strategies employed to study them. In Section 2 it is shown that if \(\{f_i\}\) is a frame in a subspace of a Hilbert space \(H\), then there is a Parseval frame \(\{x_i\}\) in a subspace of \(H\) that is quadratically close to \(\{f_i\}\), if and only if the canonical frame \(\{u_i\}\) associated to \(\{f_i\}\) is quadratically close to \(\{f_i\}\). Section 3 studies Parseval frames quadratically close to a frame. The main conclusion of this section is that if \(Q_F\) denotes the set of all Parseval frames in subspaces of \(H\) which are quadratically close to \(\{f_i\}\), then \(Q_F\) can be expressed as the union of infinitely many connected components. These components are described. The aim of Section 4 is to study symmetric approximation by Parseval frames in the connected components of \(Q_F\) described in the previous section. Section 5 presents a result on the existence and uniqueness of global symmetric approximations.