On the closure of Absolutely Norm attaining Operators

Abstract

Let $H_1$ and $H_2$ be complex Hilbert spaces and $T:H_1\rightarrow H_2$ be a bounded linear operator. We say $T$ to be norm attaining, if there exists $x\in H_1$ with $\|x\|=1$ such that $\|Tx\|=\|T\|$. If for every closed subspace $M$ of $H_1$, the restriction $T|_{M}:M\rightarrow H_2$ is norm attaining then, $T$ is called absolutely norm attaining operator or $\mathcal{AN}$-operator. If we replace the norm of the operator by the minimum modulus $m(T)=\inf{\{\|Tx\|:x\in H_1,\; \|x\|=1}\}$, then $T$ is called the minimum attaining and the absolutely minimum attaining operator (or $\mathcal{AM}$-operator) respectively. In this article, we discuss about the operator norm closure of the $\mathcal{AN}$-operators. We completely characterize operators in this closure and study several important properties. We mainly give the spectral characterization of the positive operators in this class and give the representation when the operator is normal. Later we also study the analogous properties for $\mathcal{AM}$-operators and prove that the closure of $\mathcal{AM}$-operators is same as that of the closure of $\mathcal{AN}$-operators. As a consequence, we prove similar results for operators in the norm closure of $\mathcal{AM}$-operators.