Continuous Rankin Bound for Hilbert and Banach Spaces

Abstract: Let $(\Omega, \mu)$ be a measure space and ${\tau_\alpha}{\alpha\in \Omega}$ be a normalized continuous Bessel family for a real Hilbert space $\mathcal{H}$. If the diagonal $\Delta := {(\alpha, \alpha):\alpha \in \Omega}$ is measurable in the measure space $\Omega\times \Omega$, then we show that \begin{align} (1) \quad\quad\quad\quad \sup _{\alpha, \beta \in \Omega, \alpha\neq \beta}\langle \tau\alpha, \tau_\beta\rangle \geq \frac{-(\mu\times\mu)(\Delta)}{(\mu\times\mu)((\Omega\times\Omega)\setminus\Delta)}. \end{align} We call Inequality (1) as continuous Rankin bound. It improves 76 years old result of Rankin [\textit{Ann. of Math., 1947}]. It also answers one of the questions asked by K. M. Krishna in the paper [Continuous Welch bounds with applications, \textit{Commun. Korean Math. Soc., 2023}]. We also derive Banach space version of Inequality (1).