In his famous 1981 paper, Mourre gave a sufficient condition for a self-adjoint operator to assure the absence of its singular continuous spectrum. More precisely, consider a self-adjoint operator
on a Hilbert space
(e.g.,
with the usual norm), and assume that there is a self-adjoint operator
, called a conjugate operator of
on an interval
, so that
for some positive constant and some compact operator
on
, where
denotes the spectral projection of
onto
, the commutator
, and the inequality is understood in the sense of self-adjoint operators.