LAUSR

Following a result of Hatori et al. (J Math Anal Appl 326:281–296, 2007), we give here a spectral characterization of an isomorphism from a $$C^\star $$ -algebra onto a Banach algebra. We then use this result to show that a $$C^\star $$ -algebra A is isomorphic to a Banach algebra B if and only if there exists a surjective function $$\phi :A\rightarrow B$$ satisfying (i) $$\sigma \left( \phi (x)\phi (y)\phi (z)\right) =\sigma \left( xyz\right) $$ for all $$x,y,z\in A$$ (where $$\sigma $$ denotes the spectrum), and (ii) $$\phi $$ is continuous at $$\mathbf 1$$ . In particular, if (in addition to (i) and (ii)) $$\phi (\mathbf 1)=\mathbf 1$$ , then $$\phi $$ is an isomorphism. An example shows that (i) cannot be relaxed to products of two elements, as is the case with commutative Banach algebras. The results presented here also elaborate on a paper of Bresar and Spenko (J Math Anal Appl 393:144–150, 2012), and a paper of Bourhim et al. (Arch Math 107:609–621, 2016).