Decomposability of Operators in Type $\mathrm{I}_k$ von Neumann Algebras

Abstract

Let $\mathcal{H}$ be a complex Hilbert space and $\mathcal{B}(\mathcal{H})$ be the algebra of all bounded linear operators on $\mathcal{H}$. For $A \in \mathcal{B}(\mathcal{H})$, we refer to the sequence $\{|A^{n}|^{1/n}\}_{n\in\mathbb{N}}$ as the normalized power sequence of $A$. In this article, we study the norm convergence property, i.e. convergence of normalized power sequence in the norm topology for operators belonging to type $\mathrm{I}_k$ von Neumann algebras acting on a separable complex Hilbert space. By utilizing continuous upper-triangular forms via unitary conjugations, we construct specific projection-valued families to prove that every operator in a type $\mathrm{I}_k$ von Neumann algebra is decomposable. As a consequence, this immediately establishes that every such operator possesses the norm convergence property, extending recent results known for matrices with complex-valued entries, compact operators on a separable Hilbert space, spectral operators, and Riesz operators. Finally, we provide a counterexample within the type $I_\infty$ factor $\mathcal{B}(l^2(\mathbb{N}))$ to demonstrate that this convergence property generally fails when the dimension $k$ is infinite.