Unbounded symbols, heat flow, and Toeplitz operators

TL;DR

This paper disproves a conjecture about Toeplitz operators on the Bargmann space, revealing a fundamental gap between linear and quadratic control of symbols and demonstrating the irreversibility of heat-flow regularity in this setting.

Contribution

It identifies the failure mechanism of the heat-flow conjecture for Toeplitz operators and constructs explicit examples illustrating the unboundedness phenomenon in the unbounded symbols regime.

Findings

Disproves the natural domain extension of the Berger--Coburn heat-flow conjecture.

Shows the decoupling of $T_g$ and $U_g$ operators in unbounded symbols.

Establishes the equivalence of boundedness of $U_g$ with a Fock--Carleson measure condition.

Abstract

We disprove the natural domain extension of the Berger--Coburn heat-flow conjecture for Toeplitz operators on the Bargmann space and identify the failure mechanism as a gap between pointwise and uniform control of a Gaussian averaging of the squared modulus of the symbol, a gap that is invisible to the linear form $T_g$. We establish that the form-defined operator $T_g$ and the natural-domain operator $U_g$ decouple in the unbounded symbols regime: while $T_g$ is governed by linear averaging, $U_g$ is controlled by the quadratic intensity of $|g|^2$. We construct a smooth, nonnegative radial symbol $g$ satisfying the coherent-state admissibility hypothesis with bounded heat transforms for all time $t>0$; for this symbol, $T_g$ is bounded, yet $U_g$ is unbounded. This is a strictly global phenomenon: under the coherent-state hypothesis, local singularities are insufficient to cause unboundedness, leaving the ``geometry at infinity'' as the sole obstruction. Boundedness of $U_g$ is equivalent to the condition that $|g|^2 d\mu$ is a Fock--Carleson measure, a condition strictly stronger than the linear average $g d\mu$ governing $T_g$. Finally, regarding the gap between the known sub-critical sufficiency condition and the critical heat time, we prove that heat-flow regularity is irreversible in this context and show that bootstrapping strategies cannot resolve the gap between sufficiency and critical time.