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In mathematics, a self-adjoint operator on a complex vector space V with inner product , is a linear map A (from V to itself) that is its own adjoint. That is, A x , y = x , A y {\displaystyle \langle Ax,y\rangle =\langle x,Ay\rangle } for all x , y {\displaystyle x,y} ∊ V .
The Stone–von Neumann theorem generalizes Stone's theorem to a pair of self-adjoint operators, (,), satisfying the canonical commutation relation, and shows that these are all unitarily equivalent to the position operator and momentum operator on ().
The more general continuous functional calculus can be defined for any self-adjoint (or even normal, in the complex case) bounded linear operator on a Hilbert space. The compact case described here is a particularly simple instance of this functional calculus.
An operator is called essentially self-adjoint if its closure is self-adjoint. [40] An operator is essentially self-adjoint if and only if it has one and only one self-adjoint extension. [24] A symmetric operator may have more than one self-adjoint extension, and even a continuum of them. [26] A densely defined, symmetric operator T is ...
Linear Operators is a three-volume textbook on the theory of linear operators, written by Nelson Dunford and Jacob T. Schwartz. The three volumes are (I) General Theory; (II) Spectral Theory, Self Adjoint Operators in Hilbert Space; and (III) Spectral Operators. The first volume was published in 1958, the second in 1963, and the third in 1971.
An operator that has a unique self-adjoint extension is said to be essentially self-adjoint; equivalently, an operator is essentially self-adjoint if its closure (the operator whose graph is the closure of the graph of ) is self-adjoint. In general, a symmetric operator could have many self-adjoint extensions or none at all.
The set of self-adjoint elements is a real linear subspace of . From the previous property, it follows that A {\displaystyle {\mathcal {A}}} is the direct sum of two real linear subspaces, i.e. A = A s a ⊕ i A s a {\displaystyle {\mathcal {A}}={\mathcal {A}}_{sa}\oplus \mathrm {i} {\mathcal {A}}_{sa}} .
If X is a Hilbert space and T is a self-adjoint operator (or, more generally, a normal operator), then a remarkable result known as the spectral theorem gives an analogue of the diagonalisation theorem for normal finite-dimensional operators (Hermitian matrices, for example).