The Brown Measure of Non-Hermitian Sums of Projections

Abstract

We compute the Brown measure of the non-normal operators $X = p + i q$, where $p$ and $q$ are Hermitian, freely independent, and have spectra consisting of $2$ atoms. The computation relies on the model of the non-trivial part of the von Neumann algebra generated by 2 projections as $2 \times 2$ random matrices. We observe that these measures are supported on hyperbolas and note some other properties related to their atoms and symmetries.