This is somewhat unrelated to what I normally do, so I may be missing something here, but unlike for Hilbert-Schmidt norms, very little useful methods seem to be available to calculate the norm of Trace-class operators. Let $f \in C_c^{\infty}(\mathbb{R}\times\mathbb{R}),$ then we have an operator $$Tg(s):=\int_{\mathbb{R}^2} f(s+t_1,t_2) g(t_1,t_2)dt$$ where $T:L^2(\mathbb{R}^2) \rightarrow L^2(\mathbb{R}).$ I would like to compute its trace-norm. For this, I calculated its adjoint $$T^*h(t_1,t_2):= \int_{\mathbb{R}}\overline{f(s+t_1,t_2)} h(s)ds.$$ However, now it is still completely unobvious to me how to compute $\sqrt{T^*T}$ which is needed in the trace norm. Possible ways to calculate the nuclear norm that I could imagine to be useful include a.) Use $\left\lVert T \right\rVert_{\text{nuclear}}= \sum_{n} \left\lvert \langle \sqrt{T^*T}e_n,e_n \rangle \right\rvert$ for an arbitrary orthonormal basis $(e_n)$ b.) Use Hahn-Banach, i.e. $\left\lVert T \right\rVert_{\text{nuclear}} = \sup_{S \in L(L^2(\mathbb{R}),L^2(\mathbb{R}^2)); \left\lVert S \right\rVert=1 } \operatorname{tr} (T^*S)$ or c.) Use that $\left\lVert T \right\rVert_{\text{nuclear}}$ is the supremum of all $\sum_{n} \lvert\left\langle e_n,Tf_n \right\rangle \rvert$ for ONS $(e_n),(f_n).$ (this may be useful to get bounds) **Questions:** I am paticularly curious to find out whether: **1.)** There are any theorems or tricks that apply to this operator which allow me to compute its nuclear norm. **2.)** Just based on intuition I would assume that the nuclear norm would be something like $$ \int_{\mathbb{R}^2} \left\lvert f(t_1+t_1,t_2) \right\rvert dt_1 dt_2 = \frac{1}{2} \left\lVert f \right\rVert_{L^1}.$$ Can we say if this is at least a correct lower/upper bound for the trace-norm? **3.)** Are there any non-trivial upper/lower bounds available?