In Dong et al. (2022, Journal of Operator Theory 88, 365–406), the authors addressed the question of whether surjective maps preserving the norm of a symmetric Kubo-Ando mean can be extended to Jordan $\ast $-isomorphisms. The question was affirmatively answered for surjective maps between the positive definite cones of unital $C^{*}$-algebras for certain specific classes of symmetric Kubo-Ando means. Here, we give a comprehensive answer to this question for surjective maps between the positive definite cones of $AW^{*}$-algebras preserving the norm of any symmetric Kubo-Ando mean.

In this article, the question of whether the Löwner partial order on the positive cone of an operator algebra is determined by the norm of any arbitrary Kubo–Ando mean is studied. The question was affirmatively answered for certain classes of Kubo–Ando means, yet the general case was left as an open problem. We here give a complete answer to this question, by showing that the norm of every symmetric Kubo–Ando mean is order-determining, i.e., if $A,B\in \mathcal B(H)^{++}$ satisfy $\Vert A\sigma X\Vert \le \Vert B\sigma X\Vert $ for every $X\in \mathcal {A}^{{++}}$, where $\mathcal A$ is the C*-subalgebra generated by $B-A$ and I, then $A\le B$.

We introduce sign-preserving charges on the system of all orthogonally closed subspaces, F(S), of an inner product space S, and we show that it is always bounded on all the finite-dimensional subspaces whenever dim S = ∞. When S is finite-dimensional this is not true. This fact is used for a new completeness criterion showing that S is complete whenever F(S) admits at least one non-zero sign-preserving regular charge. In particular, every such charge is always completely additive.