Close CSL algebras are similar

Abstract

In 1972 Kadison and Kastler [12] asked whether two close von Neumann subalgebras of ~ ( J f ) are unitarily equivalent by a unitary close to the identity. This question was answered affirmatively for certain classes of von Neumann algebras in [5, 4, 6, 15]. The nonselfadjoint case was first considered by Lance who showed in [13] that close nest algebras are similar via a similarity which is close to the identity. For nest algebras, there is a close connection between the question of whether closeness of algebras implies similarity and the classification of nest algebras up to similarity: this connection may be seen in the papers [7] and [14] and we shall discuss it further in Remark 8 below. The desire to extend the classification of nest algebras to the class of reflexive algebras with commutative subspace lattice was one of the motivations for the work on perturbations of matrix algebras begun in [3] and continuing with perturbations of suboolean operator algebras in [8]. In [16], we proved that if ~ ' is a hyperreflexive CSL algebra whose lattice is atomic and satisfies a certain technical condition, then any other CSL algebra whose unit ball is sufficiently close to the unit ball of d has the property that ~ is similar to d . This result was extended in [9] to the class of all hyperreflexive CSL algebras whose lattice is completely distributive. The purpose of the present paper is to remove the hypothesis of hyperreflexivity and complete distributivity from the results described above. We show that the class of all CSL algebras is stable under small perturbations. In particular, we prove Theorem 6 below, which gives a complete answer to Problem 5 of the section entitled "Open Problems" of [11].