The notion of faithful flatness of a module over a commutative ring is studied for two R-modules M arising in functional analysis, where R is a Banach algebra and M is a Hilbert space. The following results are shown:
If X is a locally compact Hausdorff topological space, and
$\mu $ is a positive Radon measure on X, then
$L^2(X,\mu )$ is a flat
$L^\infty (X,\mu )$-module. Moreover:
• If
$\mu $ is
$\sigma $-finite, then for every finitely generated, nonzero, proper ideal
$\mathfrak {n}$ of
$L^\infty (X,\mu )$, there holds
$\mathfrak {n}L^2(X,\mu )\subsetneq $
$L^2(X,\mu )$.
• If X is the union of an increasing family of Borel sets
$U_n$,
$n\!\in \! {\mathbb {N}}$, such that for each
$n\in {\mathbb {N}}$,
$\overline {U_n}$ is compact and
$\mu (U_{n+1}\setminus U_n)>0$, then
$L^2(X,\mu )$ is not a faithfully flat
$L^\infty (X,\mu )$-module.
In addition, it is shown that the classical Hardy space
$H^2$ is a flat, but not a faithfully flat
$H^\infty $-module, which answers a 2005 question of Alban Quadrat.