Linear orthogonality preservers of Hilbert bundles

TL;DR

This paper characterizes linear maps that preserve orthogonality in Hilbert bundles over commutative C*-algebras, showing they are essentially scalar multiples or composed with homeomorphisms, revealing structure-preserving transformations.

Contribution

It establishes conditions under which orthogonality-preserving maps between Hilbert C*-modules are bounded and have a specific algebraic form, extending classical results to the setting of Hilbert bundles.

Findings

Orthogonality-preserving maps are bounded and scalar multiples of inner products.

Bi-orthogonality preserving bijections relate to homeomorphisms between underlying spaces.

Maps satisfy a multiplicative property involving continuous functions.

Abstract

Due to the corresponding fact concerning Hilbert spaces, it is natural to ask if the linearity and the orthogonality structure of a Hilbert $C^*$-module determine its $C^*$-algebra-valued inner product. We verify this in the case when the $C^*$-algebra is commutative (or equivalently, we consider a Hilbert bundle over a locally compact Hausdorff space). More precisely, a $\mathbb{C}$-linear map $\theta$ (not assumed to be bounded) between two Hilbert $C^*$-modules is said to be "orthogonality preserving" if $\left<\theta(x),\theta(y)\right> =0$ whenever $\left<x,y\right> =0$. We prove that if $\theta$ is an orthogonality preserving map from a full Hilbert $C_0(\Omega)$-module $E$ into another Hilbert $C_0(\Omega)$-module $F$ that satisfies a weaker notion of $C_0(\Omega)$-linearity (known as "localness"), then $\theta$ is bounded and there exists $\phi\in C_b(\Omega)_+$ such that $$ \left<\theta(x),\theta(y)\right>\ =\ \phi\cdot\left<x,y\right>, \quad \forall x,y \in E. $$ On the other hand, if $F$ is a full Hilbert $C^*$-module over another commutative $C^*$-algebra $C_0(\Delta)$, we show that a "bi-orthogonality preserving" bijective map $\theta$ with some "local-type property" will be bounded and satisfy $$ \left<\theta(x),\theta(y)\right>\ =\ \phi\cdot\left<x,y\right>\circ\sigma, \quad \forall x,y \in E $$ where $\phi\in C_b(\Omega)_+$ and $\sigma: \Delta \rightarrow \Omega$ is a homeomorphism.