Shorting, parallel addition and form sums of nonnegative selfadjoint linear relations (Q2176132)

The notions of shorting and parallel addition defined over the cone of bounded nonnegative selfadjoint operators in a Hilbert space have been well studied in the literature. In this article, these are generalized to the set of all nonnegative selfadjoint linear relations. New properties are proved and connections with the Cayley transforms are investigated. For a pair of nonnegative selfadjoint linear relations, it is shown that there exist two arithmetic-harmonic means. Applications of the arithmetic, harmonic, and arithmetic-harmonic means to the theory of nonnegative selfadjoint extensions of nonnegative symmetric linear relations are presented.