If , part (ii) makes invertible for every nonzero scalar . Thus and : it is a quasinilpotent element. Conversely, let be a two-sided ideal consisting of quasinilpotent elements. For and , has spectrum , so is invertible. Part (ii) implies . This proves is the greatest ideal contained in the quasinilpotent set, the Jacobson radical as greatest quasinilpotent ideal characterization.
A semisimple Banach algebra is one with . For , its natural action on is faithful and algebraically irreducible. Indeed, given and any , the Hahn-Banach theorem gives a bounded functional with . The rank-one operator then maps to . Any invariant subspace containing consequently contains every . The faithful representation has kernel zero, so zero is primitive and is semisimple.
Nevertheless, choose a nonzero bounded functional and , possible when . The nonzero rank-one operator satisfies . Hence and , although . This proves the quasinilpotent set of is not ; it is not the same as the radical.
For infinite-dimensional , the finite-rank operators form a nonzero proper two-sided ideal: products with bounded operators are finite-rank, and the identity has infinite rank. Thus zero is not maximal. Even if maximal ideals are required to be closed, the compact operators give a nonzero proper closed ideal containing the finite-rank operators. The identity is not compact on an infinite-dimensional Banach space, since the Riesz lemma supplies a bounded sequence with pairwise distances bounded below. Therefore zero is primitive but not maximal in infinite dimension.
For a finite-rank operator , define and its trace norm by
where are its nonzero singular values, counted with multiplicity. The finite-rank spectral theorem gives orthonormal systems with , where .
For every bounded operator ,
Choose the contraction taking to and vanishing on their orthogonal complement. It attains equality, so
This formula proves the triangle inequality and absolute homogeneity. Also , so vanishing of the trace norm forces . Thus it is a norm on the vector space of finite-rank operators.
The map , where , is a bounded linear map into the dual of this normed space. Its norm is at most . Rank-one tests give the reverse inequality: and , so taking unit vectors gives .
Conversely, let be a bounded linear functional for the trace norm. The sesquilinear form satisfies
The Riesz representation theorem gives a unique bounded operator with , and . Since every finite-rank operator is a finite sum of rank-one operators, linearity implies for every . Hence
The same identification extends to the completion, the trace-class operators. This is trace-class duality; completeness of the original finite-rank space is not required to identify its bounded dual.
For an orthonormal basis , define the Hilbert-Schmidt norm by . For a possibly uncountable basis, the nonnegative sum means the supremum over finite subsets. Parseval's identity gives, for any other orthonormal basis ,
Changing the domain basis in the last expression proves basis independence. Polarization gives a basis-independent inner product
with the same first-argument linear convention. The sums converge by the Cauchy-Schwarz inequality. The operator-norm bound follows by applying Cauchy-Schwarz to the coordinates of a unit vector.
To prove completeness, let be Cauchy in this norm. The operator-norm bound gives a bounded-operator limit . For a finite subset of the basis,
For large , the right side is uniformly small by the Cauchy property. Taking the supremum over shows is Hilbert-Schmidt and ; it also shows is Hilbert-Schmidt. Thus the Hilbert-Schmidt operators form a Hilbert space. Finite-rank operators are dense there: keeping finitely many basis columns makes the sum of omitted squared column norms tend to zero. The operator-norm bound then shows that every Hilbert-Schmidt operator is compact.
Now let be a strongly continuous unitary representation of the compact metric group , as is standard for a representation of a topological group. Fix and average the positive rank-one operator :
The integrand is continuous in the Hilbert-Schmidt norm, so this Bochner integral exists in the complete space just proved. Normalized Haar measure and invariance show that is positive, compact and commutes with every . Moreover,
the integrand is positive near the identity and every nonempty open set has positive Haar measure. Thus . A nonzero eigenspace is finite-dimensional and invariant under , by (a). Within it choose a nonzero invariant subspace of smallest dimension; it is irreducible. Its orthogonal complement is invariant because the representation is unitary, so the finite-dimensional space splits into irreducibles.
Take a maximal orthogonal family of such finite-dimensional irreducible invariant subspaces. If their closed span had a nonzero orthogonal complement, the same averaging argument on that complement would produce another member, contradicting maximality. Therefore
This compact averaging of a rank-one operator argument does not require itself to be separable. Strong continuity is the topological representation hypothesis used in the averaging step.
Write for the rank-one operator . The estimator is the kernel representation of the empirical covariance operator
Since ,
Thus the estimator has the fixed bias of an estimator for .
The fourth-moment assumption makes square-integrable in the Hilbert space of Hilbert-Schmidt operators. The weak law of large numbers therefore gives
Consequently consistency for holds exactly when . More precisely, if , then
The Hilbert-space central limit theorem also yields
where is a centered Gaussian random element in the Hilbert-Schmidt operator space with covariance determined by . Relative to , the same fluctuation is displaced by and hence does not have a finite centered limit when .
Factor as in part b(v). Then Parseval identity for a Hilbertian basis and Cauchy-Schwarz inequality give
The defining series for the operator trace is therefore absolutely convergent and satisfies .
For unit vectors , the adjoint operator of is , and
Hence and part b(iii), followed by Parseval, gives
Scaling proves . A second use of Parseval yields
which proves the asserted rank-one operator formulas.
Trace-class duality 2026-10-14
The dual of the trace-class operators, and also of the normed space of finite-rank operators with the trace norm, is isometrically the space of bounded operators. The pairing is . For , one has and , using an inner product linear in its first argument. A bounded functional on these rank-one operators gives a bounded sesquilinear form and hence a unique by the Riesz representation theorem. The singular value decomposition proves and the triangle inequality for the trace norm.