Necessary conditions for Schatten class localization operators

We study time-frequency localization operators of the form , where is the symbol of the operator and are the analysis and synthesis windows, respectively. It is shown in an earlier paper by the authors that a sufficient condition for , the Schatten class of order , is that belongs to the modulation space and the window functions to the modulation space . Here we prove a partial converse: if for every pair of window functions with a uniform norm estimate, then the corresponding symbol must belong to the modulation space . In this sense, modulation spaces are optimal for the study of localization operators. The main ingredients in our proofs are frame theory and Gabor frames. For and , we recapture earlier results, which were obtained by different methods.