Products of orthogonal projections and polar decompositions (Q627962)

The authors study products of orthogonal projections on separable (finite- or infinite-dimensional) Hilbert spaces. In the introduction of the paper, they review the importance of the study for different problems of pure and applied mathematics, including many different areas of functional analysis, mathematical physics, signal processing, numerical analysis, statistics, and so on. This paper continues their own well-known investigations on the theory of operators in Hilbert spaces, in particular, with regard to their recent paper [\textit{G.\,Corach} and \textit{A.\,Maestripieri}, Linear Algebra Appl.\ 433, No.\,3, 511--519 (2010; Zbl 1193.47002)]. They characterize the sets \({\mathcal X}\) of all products \(PQ\), and \({\mathcal Y}\) of all products \(PQP\), where \(P,Q\) run over all orthogonal projections, and study the polar decomposition of operators in \({\mathcal X}\); in particular, they prove that \({\mathcal Y}\) coincides with positive parts of the polar decompositions of elements of \({\mathcal X}\). It is shown that the Moore-Penrose pseudoinverse operation is a bijection between \({\mathcal X}\) and the set of all closed (unbounded) projections. The authors study and systematically use the so-called canonical factorizations of operators of the set \({\mathcal X}\).