Singular value decomposition of unbounded operators

The singular value decomposition has been established for matrices, Hilbert–Schmidt operators, trace-class operator, compact operators, and bounded operators, but surprisingly not for unbounded operators. Unfortunately, most interesting operators in applied math are unbounded, as any operators involving some form of derivatives — gradient, exterior derivatives, Laplacians, Fourier and other transforms of derivatives, Hamiltonians, etc. — are likely unbounded. In this article, we fill in this last missing piece by establishing the existence of singular value decompositions for unbounded operators in three natural forms: multiplication-operator, direct-integral, and operator-valued-measure. We show it inherits classical properties of finite-dimensional singular value decomposition including approximation results, relationships with fundamental subspaces, and the Moore–Penrose inverse. This discovery opens the door to the singular value decompositions of a myriad of well-known unbounded operators in mathematics, physics, statistics, and finnance — gradients on Euclidean spaces and manifolds, Petrov–Galerkin method, finite-difference operators, Hilbert–Schmidt operators, Hilbert complexes, supersymmetric quantum mechanics, Sturm–Liouville theory, nonparametric density estimation, and the Black–Scholes equation. The resulting decompositions reveal a number of novel insights, among many others: bosonic and fermionic states in supersymmetric quantum mechanics arise as left and right singular vectors of generalized ladder operators; the Riesz transform appears as the left singular operator of the Euclidean gradient; and the Hodge decomposition follows directly from the singular value decompositions of the exterior derivatives.