Means of unitaries, conjugations, and the Friedrichs operator

If C is a conjugation (an isometric, conjugate-linear involution) on a separable complex Hilbert space H, then T∈B(H) is called C-symmetric if T=CT∗C. In this note we prove that each C-symmetric contraction T is the mean of two C-symmetric unitary operators. We discuss several corollaries and an application to the Friedrichs operator of a planar domain.