The condenser quasicentral modulus

Abstract

We introduced the quasicentral modulus to study normed ideal perturbations of operators. It is a limit of condenser quasicentral moduli in view of a recently noticed analogy with capacity in nonlinear potential theory. We prove here some basic properties of the condenser quasicentral modulus and compute a simple example. We also discuss some associated noncommutative variational problems. Part of the results are in the more general setting of a semifinite von Neumann algebra.