Rigidity of contractions on Hilbert spaces

Tanja Eisner

Published 2009-09-25, updated 2014-04-30Version 2

We study the asymptotic behaviour of contractive operators and strongly continuous semigroups on separable Hilbert spaces using the notion of rigidity. In particular, we show that a "typical" contraction $T$ contains the unit circle times the identity operator in the strong limit set of its powers, while $T^{n_j}$ converges weakly to zero along a sequence $\{n_j\}$ with density one. The continuous analogue is presented for isometric ang unitary $C_0$-(semi)groups.