A Characterization of Compact Operators Via the Non-Connectedness of the Attractors of a Family of IFSs

In this paper we present a result which establishes a connection between the theory of compact operators and the theory of iterated function systems. For a Banach space $X$ , $S$ and $T$ bounded linear operators from $X$ to $X$ such that $\Vert S\Vert , \Vert T\Vert <1$ and $w\in X$ , let us consider the IFS $\mathcal S _{w}=(X,f_{1},f_{2})$ , where $f_{1},f_{2}:X\rightarrow X$ are given by $f_{1}(x)=S(x)$ and $f_{2}(x)=T(x)+w$ , for all $x\in X$ . On one hand we prove that if the operator $S$ is compact, then there exists a family $(K_{n})_{n\in \mathbb N }$ of compact subsets of $X$ such that $A_{\mathcal S _{w}}$ is not connected, for all $w\in X-\bigcup _{n\in \mathbb N } K_{n}$ . On the other hand we prove that if $H$ is an infinite dimensional Hilbert space, then a bounded linear operator $S:H\rightarrow H$ having the property that $\Vert S\Vert <1$ is compact provided that for every bounded linear operator $T:H\rightarrow H$ such that $\Vert T\Vert <1$ there exists a sequence $(K_{T,n})_{n}$ of compact subsets of $H$ such that $A_{\mathcal S _{w}}$ is not connected for all $w\in H-\bigcup _{n}K_{T,n}$ . Consequently, given an infinite dimensional Hilbert space $H$ , there exists a complete characterization of the compactness of an operator $S:H\rightarrow H$ by means of the non-connectedness of the attractors of a family of IFSs related to the given operator. Finally we present three examples illustrating our results.