Unilateral shift operator

The unilateral shifts on sequences move every component one place left or right. Their spectra illustrate behavior absent in finite dimensions.

On the Hilbert space ${\ell }^2(\mathbb{N})$, the left shift deletes the first coordinate. It is the adjoint operator of the unilateral shift operator $S$. The identities $LS=I$ and $SLf=f-f_1{e}_1$ show that it is also the Moore–Penrose inverse of an operator for $S$; both maps have operator norm one.

The point spectrum of an operator is its set of eigenvalues.

An operator $T$ is a unilateral shift exactly when it is an isometry, $(\mathrm{Im}T{)}^{\perp }$ is one-dimensional, and ${\bigcap }_{n\ge 1}\mathrm{Im}(T^n)=\{0\}$. A unit vector $e_1$ in the first orthogonal complement is wandering, and $e_n=T^{n-1}{e}_1$ is a complete orthonormal basis.