Spectra of $2\times2$ Upper Triangular Operator Matrices


Junjie Huang, Aichun Liu, Alatancang Chen




The spectra of the $2\times2$ upper triangular operator matrix $M_C=\big(\begin{smallmatrix}A&C\\0&B\end{smallmatrix}\big)$ acting on a Hilbert space $H_1\otimes H_2$ are investigated. We obtain a necessary and sufficient condition of $\sigma(M_C)=\sigma(A)\cup(B)$ for every $C\in\mathcal B(H_2,H_1)$, in terms of the spectral properties of two diagonal elements $A$ and $B$ of $M_C$. Also, the analogues for the point spectrum, residual spectrum and continuous spectrum are further presented. Moveover, we construct some examples illustrating our main results. In particular, it is shown that the inclusion $\sigma_r(M_C)\subseteq \sigma_r(A)\cup\sigma_r(B)$ for every $C\in\mathcal B(H_2,H_1)$ is not correct in general. Note that $\sigma(T)$ (resp. $\sigma_r(T)$) denotes the spectrum (resp. residual spectrum) of an operator $T$, and $\mathcal B(H_2,H_1)$ is the set of all bounded linear operators from $H_2$ to $H_1$.