Orthogonality preserving property for pairs of operators on Hilbert $C^*$-modules

TL;DR

This paper studies how pairs of operators on Hilbert $C^*$-modules preserve orthogonality, characterizing their structure and extending known results to unbounded and local operators with new techniques.

Contribution

It extends orthogonality-preserving results from single to pairs of operators on Hilbert $C^*$-modules, including unbounded and local cases, with a detailed algebraic characterization.

Findings

Characterization of pairs of operators preserving orthogonality via the center of the multiplier algebra.

Extension of results to unbounded and local operators with bounded inverses.

New techniques providing deeper insights into the structure of orthogonality-preserving mappings.

Abstract

We investigate the orthogonality preserving property for pairs of mappings on inner product $C^*$-modules extending existing results for a single orthogonality-preserving mapping. Guided by the point of view that the $C^*$-valued inner product structure of a Hilbert $C^*$-module is determined essentially by the module structure and by the orthogonality structure, pairs of linear and local orthogonality-preserving mappings are investigated, not a priori bounded. The intuition is that most often $C^*$-linearity and boundedness can be derived from the settings under consideration. In particular, we obtain that if $\mathscr{A}$ is a $C^{*}$-algebra and $T, S:\mathscr{E}\longrightarrow \mathscr{F}$ are two bounded ${\mathscr A}$-linear mappings between full Hilbert $\mathscr{A}$-modules, then $\langle x, y\rangle = 0$ implies $\langle T(x), S(y)\rangle = 0$ for all $x, y\in \mathscr{E}$ if and only if there exists an element $\gamma$ of the center $Z(M({\mathscr A}))$ of the multiplier algebra $M({\mathscr A})$ of ${\mathscr A}$ such that $\langle T(x), S(y)\rangle = \gamma \langle x, y\rangle$ for all $x, y\in \mathscr{E}$. In particular, for adjointable operators $S$ we have $T=(S^*)^{-1}$, and any bounded invertible module operator $T$ may appear. Varying the conditions on the mappings $T$ and $S$ we obtain further affirmative results for local operators and for pairs of a bounded and of an unbounded module operator with bounded inverse, among others. Also, unbounded operators with disjoint ranges are considered. The proving techniques give new insights.