The Closed Extensions of a Closed Operator

Abstract

Given a densely defined and closed operator $A$ acting on a complex Hilbert space $\mathcal{H}$, we establish a one-to-one correspondence between its closed extensions and subspaces $\mathfrak{M}\subset\mathcal{D}(A^*)$, that are closed with respect to the graph norm of $A^*$ and satisfy certain conditions. In particular, this will allow us to characterize all densely defined and closed restrictions of $A^*$. After this, we will express our results using the language of Gel'fand triples generalizing the well-known results for the selfadjoint case. As applications we construct: (i) a sequence of densely defined operators that converge in the generalized sense to a non-densely defined operator, (ii) a non-closable extension of a symmetric operator and (iii) selfadjoint extensions of Laplacians with a generalized boundary condition.