AbstractFew years ago Găvruţa gave the notions of K-frame and atomic system for a linear bounded operator K in a Hilbert space $$\mathcal {H}$$
H
in order to decompose $$\mathcal {R}(K)$$
R
(
K
)
, the range of K, with a frame-like expansion. These notions are here generalized to the case of a densely defined and possibly unbounded operator A on a Hilbert space in a continuous setting, thus extending what have been done in a previous paper in a discrete framework.