A quantitative subspace Balian-Low theorem

Abstract: Let $\mathcal G\subset L^2(\mathbb R)$ be the subspace spanned by a Gabor Riesz sequence $(g,\Lambda)$ with $g\in L^2(\mathbb R)$ and a lattice $\Lambda\subset\mathbb R^2$ of rational density. It was shown recently that if $g$ is well-localized both in time and frequency, then $\mathcal G$ cannot contain any time-frequency shift $\pi(z) g$ of $g$ with $z\notin\Lambda$. In this paper, we improve the result to the quantitative statement that the $L^2$-distance of $\pi(z)g$ to the space $\mathcal G$ is equivalent to the Euclidean distance of $z$ to the lattice $\Lambda$, in the sense that the ratio between those two distances is uniformly bounded above and below by positive constants. On the way, we prove several results of independent interest, one of them being closely related to the so-called weak Balian-Low theorem for subspaces.