A trace inequality for commuting tuple of operators

Publication date: 20 December 2020

Abstract: For a commuting

d

- tuple of operators

defined on a complex separable Hilbert space

m a t h c a l H

, let

be the

d i m e s d

block operator

of the commutators

[T_{j}^{*}, T_{i}] := T_{j}^{*} T_{i} - T_{i} T_{j}^{*}

. We define the determinant of

by symmetrizing the products in the Laplace formula for the determinant of a scalar matrix. We prove that the determinant of

equals the generalized commutator of the

2 d

- tuple of operators,

(T_{1}, T_{1}^{*}, l d o t s, T_{d}, T_{d}^{*})

introduced earlier by Helton and Howe. We then apply the Amitsur-Levitzki theorem to conclude that for any commuting

d

- tuple of

d

- normal operators, the determinant of

must be

0

. We show that if the

d

- tuple

is cyclic, the determinant of

is non-negative and the compression of a fixed set of words in

T_{j}^{*}

and

T_{i}

-- to a nested sequence of finite dimensional subspaces increasing to

m a t h c a l H

-- does not grow very rapidly, then the trace of the determinant of the operator

is finite. Moreover, an upper bound for this trace is given. This upper bound is shown to be sharp for a class of commuting

d

- tuples. We make a conjecture of what might be a sharp bound in much greater generality and verify it in many examples.

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