V. Kostrykin, K. A. Makarov, A. K. Motovilov On the existence of solutions to the operator Riccati equation and the \tan\Theta theorem (105K, LaTeX2e) ABSTRACT. Let A and C be self-adjoint operators such that the spectrum of A lies in a gap of the spectrum of C and let d>0 be the distance between the spectra of A and C. We prove that under these assumptions the sharp value of the constant c in the condition ||B||