Complementation and Lebesgue type decompositions of linear operators and relations

Abstract: In this paper a new general approach is developed to construct and study Lebesgue type decompositions of linear operators $T$ in the Hilbert space setting. The new approach allows to introduce an essentially wider class of Lebesgue type decompositions than what has been studied in the literature so far. The key point is that it allows a nontrivial interaction between the closable and the singular components of $T$. The motivation to study such decompositions comes from the fact that they naturally occur in the corresponding Lebesgue type decomposition for pairs of quadratic forms. The approach built in this paper uses so-called complementation in Hilbert spaces, a notion going back to de Branges and Rovnyak.