Contractive projections and operator spaces

Abstract

Parallel to the study of finite dimensional Banach spaces, there is a growing interest in the corresponding local theory of operator spaces. We define a family of Hilbertian operator spaces H_n^k,0< k < n+1, generalizing the row and column Hilbert spaces R_n,C_n and show that an atomic subspace X of B(H) which is the range of a contractive projection on B(H) is isometrically completely contractive to a direct sum of the H_n^k and Cartan factors of types 1 to 4. In particular, for finite dimensional X, this answers a question posed by Oikhberg and Rosenthal. Explicit in the proof is a classification up to complete isometry of atomic w*-closed JW*-triples without an infinite dimensional rank 1 w^*-closed ideal