Abstract: Denote by the group of all unitary operators in where is a separable infinite-dimensional complex Hilbert space and is any two-sided ideal of . A Cartan subalgebra of is defined in this paper as a maximal abelian self-adjoint subalgebra of~ and its conjugacy class is defined herein as the set of Cartan subalgebras . For nonzero proper ideals we construct an uncountable family of Cartan subalgebras of with distinct conjugacy classes. This is in contrast to the by now classical observation of P. de La Harpe who noted that when is any of the Schatten ideals, there is precisely one conjugacy class under the action of the full group of unitary operators on~. In the case when is a symmetrically normed ideal and is the dual of some Banach space, we show how the conjugacy classes of the Cartan subalgebras of become smooth manifolds modeled on suitable Banach spaces. These manifolds are endowed with groups of smooth transformations given by the action of the group on the orbits, and are equivariantly diffeomorphic to each other. We then find that there exists a unique diffeomorphism class of full flag manifolds of and we give its construction.
