SOME CHARACTERIZATIONS OF COMMUTATIVE SUBSPACE LATTICES (Q4465121)

The main result of the paper under review states that a lattice of commuting projections on a Hilbert space of arbitrary dimension is closed under arbitrary suprema and infima if and only if it is closed in the strong operator topology (i.e., if and only if it is a commutative subspace lattice). To show this, the author undertakes a detailed analysis of the preorders induced by such lattices on the representing Stonean spaces and provides an equivalent condition to the conditions above, in order-topological terms. Commutative subspace lattices are also characterised as the lattices \(\mathcal{L}\) of commuting projections for which the norm closed cone generated by \(\mathcal{L}\) and \(-I\) is automatically closed in the strong operator topology. The author defines a commutative conic lattice to be a norm closed commutative subcone \(\mathcal{S}\) of \(B(H)_{\text{sa}}\) containing \(tI\) for all real \(t\) and such that, whenever \(S,T\in \mathcal{S}\), the infimum and the supremum of \(S\) and \(T\) in \(\{S,T\}'\) belong to \(\mathcal{S}\). It is shown that a commutative conic lattice is closed in the strong operator topology if and only if it is generated by a commutative subspace lattice and the operator \(-I\).