1. Introduction and Notations
In this paper, we plan to further analyze the structure arising from two sets of orthonormal vectors in a more applied context. In fact, operatorial methods based on the dynamics of raising and lowering operators of quantum mechanics have been successfully used for the mathematical description of some macroscopic systems ([
1,
2,
3]). These operators are as usually constructed by defining their action over the eigenstates 
, of the self-adjoint Hamiltonian operator (essentially the operator 
 in this work), which is the energy-like operator including all the possible mechanisms between the actors of the system. We aim to further extend these approaches by using suitable non-self-adjoint Hamiltonians (
), and to understand whether the dynamics produced by (
12) can be used to determine a proper time evolution of the relevant observables of the system.
Let  be a dense subspace of a Hilbert space  As mentioned in the Introduction the problem of extending the Gibbs states  defined on  may have, in some situations, easy solutions, namely when  is closable.
This means that one of the two equivalent statements which follow is satisfied. Define
      
- If  with regard to  and , then . 
- , the closure of , does not contain couples  with . 
In this case, we define
      
      and
      
The closability of  implies that  is well defined. The functional  is linear and is the minimal closed extension of  (i.e.,  is closed). However, in general w is not closable.
We denote by 
 the set of all closable, see [
4], linear operators 
X such that 
The set 
 is a partial *-algebra, see [
4], with respect to the following operations: the usual sum 
, the scalar multiplication 
, the involution 
 and the 
(weak) partial multiplication 
, defined whenever 
 is a weak right multiplier of 
 (we shall write 
 or 
), i.e., iff 
 and 
Let 
 be the subspace of 
 consisting of all its elements which leave, together with their adjoints, the domain 
 invariant. Then 
 is a *-algebra with respect to the usual operations (see [
4]).
In concrete applications in physics it may happen that (the clousure of) three different operators, 
 and 
 have only point spectra, and that all the eigenvalues coincide. In particular, in [
5] several such triples of operators have been discussed and the following eigenvalues equations are deduced:
      where 
 for all 
 Here 
 is an orthonormal basis for the Hilbert space 
, while 
 and 
 are two biorthogonal sets, 
, not necessarily bases for 
 However, quite often, 
 and 
 are complete in 
 and, see [
5], they are also 
-quasi bases, i.e., they produce a weak resolution of the identity in a dense subspace 
 of 
:
      for all 
. The o.n. basis 
 are used to define a Gibbs state on 
 as follows:
      where 
. Here 
 is the inverse temperature, always larger than zero. Sometimes 
 is written as 
, where 
.
Hence, in view of (
1), in [
5] we have seen what happens if, in (
2), we replace 
 with 
H or with 
, and the 
’s with the 
’s or with the 
’s. To do this, in [
5] we assumed that 
, 
H and 
 are closed and, at least, densely defined, and 
 A generalization of the above definition (
2) could be useful therefore we assume 
.
In this paper, particular attention is devoted to these operators. Moreover, they can be used to define a new 
 as a Gibbs state on 
 In [
5] we have assumed that 
, 
H are closed and, at least, densely defined, without giving information on the domain of these operators. The question then becomes: is there a dense domain 
 that allows us to generalize the states of Gibbs and taking them in their natural environment i.e., defined in 
?
To keep the paper sufficiently self-contained, we collect below some preliminary definitions and propositions that will be used in what follows. Throughout this paper we assume that 
 is a dense subspace of a Hilbert space 
 and 
 is an orthonormal basis for the Hilbert space 
 When 
 and 
 are Riesz bases, we can find a bounded operator 
T, with bounded inverse, such that
      
      for all 
n.
The paper is organized as follows. 
Section 2 is devoted to proving that is there a dense domain 
 that allows us to generalize the states of Gibbs and taking them in their natural environment i.e., defined in 
 therefore we enriched what was already discussed in [
5]. In 
Section 3 we consider some special classes of trace possibilities ad further generalization of 
 enriching the information given in [
5]. Our concluding remarks are given in 
Section 4.
Definition 1. Let  be two linear operators in the Hilbert spaces  Then, we say that V and K are similar, and write  if there exists a bounded operator T with bounded inverse  which intertwines K and V in the sense that  and  for every  and write 
 A bounded operator 
T of the previous definition, see [
4], is called a bounded intertwining operator for 
V and 
Let 
 be as in (
1) we denote by 
 their closures and we assume that 
The self-adjointness of  implies, as we know, the existence and the self-adjointness of all its powers  in  and it is also known that the domain:  is dense.
In [
5] we have shown that
Proposition 1. Let  and  be Riesz bases as in (3). If  is a self-adjoint operator such thatand if the linear span of  is a core for  then  and clearly  with intertwining operator     2. Stating the Problem and Results
Coming back to the Gibbs states, the o.n. basis 
 can be used to define a Gibbs state as follows:
      on 
 the set of all bounded operators on 
, or on 
 where 
.
The functional 
 is linear, normalized, continuous and positive: 
, and faithful i.e., it is equal to zero only when 
. If we define the following standard Heisenberg time evolution on 
, by
      
, 
 turns out to satisfy the following equation:
      for all 
. The abstract version of this equation is known in the literature as the 
KMS relation [
6], and it is used to analyze phase transitions.
Clearly, in general, if 
 is a dense generic subspace of 
 then 
 This fact strongly depends on the set 
 Moreover,
      
      clearly 
 However, if we choose now 
 we have 
 Indeed, by the spectral representation, there exists a family of projection operators 
 which commute with 
 such that
      
      then if 
 we have
      
      therefore 
Thus, if 
 then
      
What we are interested in here is the possibility of extending the state 
 to the situation where we know 
 and 
, rather than 
. This is exactly what happens in pseudo-Hermitian quantum mechanics, and for this reason, we believe it is relevant in concrete situations. In this section, following [
5], we will define the following functionals:
      where 
X, for the time being, is just an operator on 
 such that the right-hand sides above both converge, and 
 and 
 which is always satisfied in concrete examples.
Definition 2. The biorthogonal sets  and  are calledwell-behavedif  and .
 In view of its possible physical applications, it is also interesting to check what happens if we still have 
 and 
, but at least one between 
T and 
 is unbounded 
. In this case, the sets 
 and 
 might be 
-quasi bases, i.e., if, for all 
, the following holds: for every 
 and 
In this case,
      
      which makes sense if 
. This is relevant if we want to extend our results to unbounded operators.
  Gibbs States
Equation (
10) shows that 
 and 
 can be related to 
. Since we know that this vector satisfies the KMS-condition (
6), we now investigate if some (generalized version of) KMS-relation is also satisfied by our states. In this section, we will always assume that 
 Going back the start point the starting point of our analysis are the following relations:
        for all 
n, which implies also that for all complex 
,
        
        for all 
n. Of course, these equalities can be extended to the linear span of the 
’s, which is dense in 
.
Recalling that the dynamics is one of the main ingredients of the KMS-condition, it is clear that we must face with this problem also here. Natural possibilities which extend that in (
5) are the following
        
        for some 
X. These are two different, and both absolutely reasonable, definitions of 
time evolution of the operator 
X. However, it is evident that these definitions present some problems. First, being 
 and 
 non self-adjoint and, quite often, unbounded, their exponentials should be properly defined (see Equation (
11)). Moreover, in general, domain problems clearly occur: even if 
, and 
 it is not guaranteed that 
, in fact, but as we shall see if 
 these problems are eliminated.
For this reason, it is convenient to define 
 as follows:
        for all 
. It is clear that the right-hand side of this equation is well defined. It is interesting to notice that 
 has all the nice properties of a dynamics, [
7,
8].
Going back to (
13), from (
11) it follows that on a dense domain, 
, so that for every 
 we have
        
        so that we go back to the natural definition of the dynamics proposed first. Now, following [
5] but for all 
, we deduce that
        
        while
        
Therefore, if 
B commutes with 
, 
, then
        
It is interesting to notice that the role of 
A in the relevant assumption for (
16) to hold is absolutely not relevant. Also, in case we have 
, everything collapses to the standard situation described at the beginning of 
Section 2.
Similar computations of [
5] and similar considerations can be repeated for 
 for all 
  3. A Possible Further Generalization of 
How it is known sometimes 
 is written as 
, where 
 then further generalization of 
 is possible proposed defining. Let 
 be a dense subspace of 
. A locally convex topology 
t on 
 finer than the topology induced by the Hilbert norm defines, in standard fashion, a 
rigged Hilbert space
      where 
 is the vector space of all continuous conjugate linear functionals on 
, i.e., the conjugate dual of 
, endowed with the 
strong dual topology , which can be defined by the seminorms (see [
4])
      
      where 
 is a bounded subset of 
.
Since the Hilbert space 
 can be identified with a subspace of 
, we will systematically read (
17) as a chain of topological inclusions: 
. These identifications imply that the sesquilinear form 
 that puts 
 and 
 in duality is an extension of the inner product of 
; i.e., 
, for every 
 (to simplify notations we adopt the symbol 
 for both of them) and also that the embedding map 
 can be taken to act on 
 as 
 for every 
.
Let now 
 be a rigged Hilbert space, and let 
 denote the vector space of all continuous linear maps from 
 into 
. If 
 is barreled (e.g., reflexive), an involution 
 can be introduced in 
 by the equality
      
Hence, in this case,  is a -invariant vector space.
If 
 is a smooth space (e.g., Fréchet and reflexive), then 
 is a quasi *-algebra over 
 ([
4] Definition 2.1.9).
We also denote by 
 the algebra of all continuous linear operators 
. If 
 is reflexive, for every 
 there exists a unique operator 
, the adjoint of 
Y, such that
      
In similar way an operator 
 has an adjoint 
 such that 
. The problem of extending 
 defined on 
 in the quasi *-algebra 
 can be approached with the methods of Slight extensions (see [
9,
10,
11,
12,
13,
14,
15,
16,
17]. In this case, we define
      
Let  denote the collection of all subspaces H of  such that
      
- (g1)
- (g2)
-  if, and only if, . 
Then, to every 
, it corresponds an extension 
, to be called a 
slight extension of 
, defined on
      
      by
      
      where 
ℓ is the unique complex number such that 
.
Moreover, by applying Zorn’s lemma to the family  one has
Proposition 2.  admits a maximal slight extension.