Periodicity of functionals and representations of normed algebras on reflexive spaces

Abstract

It is a well-known fact that any normed algebra can be represented isometrically as an algebra of operators with the operator norm. As might be expected from the very universality of this property, it is little used in the study of the structure of an algebra. Far more helpful are representations on Hilbert space, though these are correspondingly hard to come by: isometric representations on Hilbert space are not to be expected in general, and even continuous nontrivial representations may fail to exist. The purpose of this paper is to examine a class of representations intermediate in both availability and utility to those already mentioned—namely, representations on reflexive spaces. There certainly are normed algebras which admit isometric representations of the latter type but have not even faithful representations on Hilbert space: the most natural example is the algebra of all continuous linear operators on E where E = lp with 1 < p ≠ 2 < ∞, for Berkson and Porta proved in (2) that if E, F are taken from the spaces lp with 1 < p < ∞ and E ≠ F then the only continuous homomorphism from into is the zero mapping. On the other hand there are also algebras which have no continuous nontrivial representation on any reflexive space—for example the algebra of finite-rank operators on an irreflexive Banach space (see Berkson and Porta (2) or Barnes (1) or Theorem 3, Corollary 1 below).