Positive operator Created 2026-09-24 Updated 2026-10-06
A bounded Hermitian operator on a Hilbert space is positive when for every . Its spectrum is contained in .
A Hermitian form is positive semidefinite when for every vector. It need not define an inner product, because a nonzero vector may have zero squared norm. The Cauchy-Schwarz inequality still holds: applying nonnegativity to and minimizing the quadratic expression in gives when ; when , varying forces . Thus its zero-norm vectors are exactly the radical of a Hermitian form. Quotienting this radical of a Hermitian form gives a positive inner product; taking its Hilbert space completion then gives a Hilbert space. This is the final positivity step in the Gupta-Bleuler null-state quotient.
A bounded linear operator preserves positivity when it takes nonnegative functions to nonnegative functions. By linearity it also preserves the pointwise order: implies . For example, integration against a nonnegative kernel preserves positivity, as does the identity operator. This is order positivity, which differs from a positive quadratic form on a Hilbert space.
For a real Hilbert space, , and , identify with its vector by the Riesz representation theorem. Completing the square in shifts the input to . Substitute and multiply by to obtain the displayed formula, valid also for negative . If and , the answer is ; if , the objective is identically infinite and no proper proximal problem remains.
Quadratic norm penalty 2026-10-06
A squared Hilbert space norm penalizes reconstruction size in Tikhonov regularization. For , adding to produces a strictly convex coercive function with unique minimizer. Its first variation contributes to the normal equation for a linear inverse problem, shifting to . It selects a minimum-norm representative and controls amplification of noisy small-singular-value components.
Quantum register 2026-10-06
A quantum register is a named tensor product factor of a quantum circuit's Hilbert space, usually a collection of qubits. Registers separate data, control, output and workspace roles; uncomputation returns workspace to a fixed quantum state without destroying coherence in the data.
Quantum superposition 2026-10-07
A normalized quantum state is a linear combination of orthonormal basis vectors in a Hilbert space. Its density operator is . When at least two basis amplitudes are nonzero, it has off-diagonal terms and differs from the mixed state . Quantum gates act linearly on this superposition and preserve its phase information.
Quantum system 2026-09-25
A quantum system is modeled by a complex Hilbert space; its quantum states describe preparations, while observables describe measurable quantities.
For a bounded linear operator between Hilbert spaces, minimize , with . The objective is coercive and weakly lower semicontinuous, and its strictly convex norm penalty gives a unique minimizer. Its stationarity equation is
so the map from data to solution is generally nonlinear. For admissible fixed , comparison with bounds the minimizer's norm by and makes its squared residual converge to the minimum least-squares residual. Every weak cluster point is therefore a least-squares solution of norm at most , hence equals the minimum-norm least-squares solution. Weak lower semicontinuity then forces convergence of norms, and the Radon-Riesz theorem gives strong convergence. This supplies a nonlinear regularization of an inverse problem.
For completeness, the fixed- data-to-solution map is continuous. For , setting and gives
Subtracting the stationarity equations for data and pairing with therefore gives . Thus
which proves continuity directly.
Qubit Created 2026-09-25 Updated 2026-10-06
A qubit is a two-dimensional quantum system. Its pure state is a ray in a two-dimensional complex Hilbert space and may be written with .
Qudit Created 2026-10-06 Updated 2026-10-07
A qudit is a quantum subsystem with distinguishable basis states and Hilbert space . A qubit is the special case . Tensor products of qudits give a natural setting for local Hamiltonians and finite-dimensional quantum circuits.
Range of a bounded linear operator Created 2026-10-05 Updated 2026-10-06
The operator range is the image of a linear map . It need not be closed in an infinite-dimensional Hilbert space; that failure makes the Moore–Penrose inverse of an operator unbounded on its domain.
For on the Hilbert space , every image has a weak derivative and zero trace at zero. Conversely every such Sobolev space element is this integral of its weak derivative. The range is dense because it contains smooth functions supported in , but it is not closed: a step function can be approximated in by continuous ramps and is not itself in . The Moore–Penrose inverse of an operator has this range as its domain and differentiates there.
Self-adjoint operator Created 2026-09-24 Updated 2026-10-07
A densely defined operator on a Hilbert space is self-adjoint when it equals its adjoint operator, including equality of their operator domains:
For a bounded linear operator defined on the whole Hilbert space, this is equivalent to
for all vectors . For an unbounded self-adjoint operator, the domain condition is essential: the inner-product identity on alone gives only a symmetric operator.
Solvability condition 2026-10-05
A solvability condition is a compatibility requirement on data for an equation to admit a solution in a specified function space or with specified boundary behavior. For a bounded linear operator between Hilbert spaces, the equation requires to be orthogonal to the kernel of the adjoint. A closed range makes that requirement sufficient; the Fredholm alternative for a compact operator applies this principle to with compact . in an asymptotic inner problem, exclusion of a growing homogeneous mode can impose an analogous weighted-integral condition.
Let be a bounded linear operator from a real Banach space to a real Hilbert space, let be a proper lower-semicontinuous convex function, and let and . For an existing minimizer of and a source condition in variational regularization , let and . Its optimality subgradient is . Then . The displayed estimate follows from .
If is a commutative C-star algebra of bounded operators on a Hilbert space containing its identity, there is a unique regular projection-valued measure on the character space such that and for every , where is the Gelfand transform.
In a normed vector space, this set consists of all points at a fixed positive norm distance from . It also makes sense in an infinite-dimensional Hilbert space, unlike a specifically Euclidean sphere. In a real Hilbert space, the sphere in a normed vector space has tangent variations satisfying ; this follows by differentiating the fixed squared norm. This is the geometric constraint used in fixed-energy initial-condition optimality.