Completely 1-complemented subspaces of Schatten spaces

Abstract

We consider the Schatten spaces S^p in the framework of operator space theory and for any $1\leq p\not=2<\infty$, we characterize the completely 1-complemented subspaces of S^p. They turn out to be the direct sums of spaces of the form S^p(H,K), where H,K are Hilbert spaces. This result is related to some previous work of Arazy-Friedman giving a description of all 1-complemented subspaces of S^p in terms of the Cartan factors of types 1-4. We use operator space structures on these Cartan factors regarded as subspaces of appropriate noncommutative L^p-spaces. Also we show that for any $n\geq 2$, there is a triple isomorphism on some Cartan factor of type 4 and of dimension 2n which is not completely isometric, and we investigate L^p-versions of such isomorphisms.