Part c gives the integral representation
The integrand vanishes on the diagonal . Thus the assumed off-diagonal Peskun ordering implies
for every .
On the mean-zero subspace, the variational characterization of the spectral gap of a positive reversible kernel is
It follows immediately that
Equivalently, the energy inequality says in the Löwner order on . Positivity permits the operator monotonicity of the square root and hence ; the spectral representations in the question identify the top spectral values and give the same gap inequality.
A projection-valued measure on the Borel sets of is a map into the orthogonal projections on a separable Hilbert space such that
and for pairwise disjoint ,
for every , with convergence in norm.
The spectral theorem for normal operators on a separable Hilbert space states that a bounded normal operator has a unique projection-valued measure supported on for which
More generally, the Borel functional calculus for a normal operator is
For , the scalar spectral measures are
If is self-adjoint, its spectrum and hence the support of lie in . Moreover,
so is a positive measure, and
The paper prints total mass ; with the standard definition it is , so the unsquared norm is a typographical error.
Let and be the projection-valued measures of and . Using the projection , define
The scalar spectral measures converge weakly when
for every bounded continuous function and every . By the spectral theorem for normal operators on a separable Hilbert space, this is equivalent to
The assumed moment identities say precisely that this convergence holds for every monomial . It follows by linearity for every polynomial. For , the identity gives
so Markov inequality makes the positive measures tight. Higher even moments similarly control the tails of any fixed polynomial.
Given a bounded continuous and , choose so that the measure tails are uniformly small. The Weierstrass approximation theorem supplies a polynomial with
Moment convergence handles ; tightness and a sufficiently high even moment handle the two tails. Hence . The polarization identity then gives the same conclusion for . This proves weak convergence of scalar spectral measures.
The assertion fails if only is assumed. Let , let , take , and let
The reversal matrices are self-adjoint unitaries. For fixed ,
because the finite head of one vector is paired with the vanishing tail of the other. Thus the condition holds. However, , so
in general. Taking shows that the spectral measures do not converge weakly.
Scalar spectral measure 2026-09-28
For a projection-valued measure and vectors , the scalar spectral measure is the complex measure . The positive measure has total mass .
Spectral projector 2026-09-28
A spectral projector is the value of the projection-valued measure of a normal operator on a measurable part of its spectrum. In finite dimension, the spectral projector onto an eigenspace extracts the corresponding eigenvector component.