Linear orthogonality preservers of Hilbert bundles

Abstract

Due to the corresponding fact concerning Hilbert spaces, it is natural to ask if the linearity and the orthogonality structure of a Hilbert $C^*$-module determine its $C^*$-algebra-valued inner product. We verify this in the case when the $C^*$-algebra is commutative (or equivalently, we consider a Hilbert bundle over a locally compact Hausdorff space). More precisely, a $\mathbb{C}$-linear map $\theta$ (not assumed to be bounded) between two Hilbert $C^*$-modules is said to be "orthogonality preserving" if \left =0 whenever \left =0. We prove that if $\theta$ is an orthogonality preserving map from a full Hilbert $C_0(\Omega)$-module $E$ into another Hilbert $C_0(\Omega)$-module $F$ that satisfies a weaker notion of $C_0(\Omega)$-linearity (known as "localness"), then $\theta$ is bounded and there exists $\phi\in C_b(\Omega)_+$ such that \left\ =\ \phi\cdot\left, \quad \forall x,y \in E. On the other hand, if $F$ is a full Hilbert $C^*$-module over another commutative $C^*$-algebra $C_0(\Delta)$, we show that a "bi-orthogonality preserving" bijective map $\theta$ with some "local-type property" will be bounded and satisfy \left\ =\ \phi\cdot\left\circ\sigma, \quad \forall x,y \in E where $\phi\in C_b(\Omega)_+$ and $\sigma: \Delta \rightarrow \Omega$ is a homeomorphism