On the range of the Aluthge transform (Q2464693)

The paper under review concerns the range of the Aluthge transform of Hilbert space operators. Let \(\mathcal{B(H)}\) be the algebra of bounded linear operators acting on a complex separable Hilbert space \(\mathcal{H}\). For an operator \(T\in\mathcal{B(H)}\), the Aluthge transform of \(T\) is defined by \(\widetilde{T}=| T|^{1/2}U| T|^{1/2}\), where \(T=U| T| \) is the polar decomposition of \(T\). Write \(\Delta(T):=\widetilde{T}\) for each \(T\in\mathcal{B(H)}\). The authors of this paper consider the range \(R(\Delta)=\{\widetilde{T}:T\in \mathcal{B(H)}\}\) of \(\Delta\). They prove that, if \(\text{dim}\,(\mathcal{H})\geq 2\), then \(R(\Delta)\) is neither closed nor dense in \(\mathcal{B(H)}\) and that \(R(\Delta)\) is strongly dense if \(\mathcal{H}\) is infinite-dimensional. Theorem~3 may fail if \(\dim(\mathcal H)=2\). Thus the assumption of Theorem~3 should be strengthened by \(\dim(\mathcal H)\geq 3\); see the erratum to this paper [ibid.\ 58, No.\,3, 447 (2007)].