On Infinite Matrices, Schur Products and Operator Measures

Measures with values in the set of sesquilinear forms on a subspace of a Hilbert space are of interest in quantum mechanics, since they can be interpreted as observables with only a restricted set of possible measurement preparations. In this paper, we consider the question under which conditions such a measure extends to an operator-valued measure, in the concrete setting where the measure is defned on the Borel sets of the interval [0, 2π) and is covariant with respect to shifts, in this case, the measure is characterized with a single infinite matrix, and it turns out that a basic sufficient condition for the extensibility is that the matrix be a Schur multiplier. Accordingly, we also study the connection between the extensibility problem and the theory of Schur multipliers. In particular, we define some new norms for Schur multipliers.