Closed-range composition operators on Dirichlet-type spaces (Q371832)

The Dirichlet-type space \(D(\mu)\), associated with a positive finite Borel measure \(\mu\) on the boundary of the unit disk \(\mathbb D\) of the complex plane, is defined as the space of all analytic functions on \(\mathbb D\) such that \(\int_{\mathbb D} |f'|^2 P_\mu\,dA<\infty\), where \(P_\mu\) is the Poisson integral of \(\mu\) and \(A\) is the area measure on \(\mathbb D\). Using the fact that \(D(\mu)\) is contained in the Hardy space \(H^2\), the norm on \(D(\mu)\) is given by \(\displaystyle ||f||_{D(\mu)}:=(||f||^2_{H^2} + || f'||^2_{L^2(P_\mu dA)})^{1/2}\) with the convention \(D(0)=H^2\). Given an analytic self-map \(\varphi\) of \(\mathbb D\), let \(C_\varphi\) be the composition operator given by \(C_\varphi f= f\circ \varphi\) for analytic functions \(f\) on \(\mathbb D\). In this paper, the author studies closed-range composition operators acting from a Dirichlet-type space into another under the restriction that the measures are finitely atomic measures, i.e., linear combinations of Dirac point masses with positive coefficients. The author first characterizes boundedness of \(C_\varphi: D(\mu)\to D(\nu)\) by the boundedness of the quantity \(\displaystyle\tau_\varphi(w):={1\over{P_\mu(w)}}{\sum_{z\in\varphi^{-1}(w)} P_\nu(z)}\) as \(|w|\to 1^{-}\). When \(C_\varphi: D(\mu)\to D(\nu)\) is known to be bounded, the author then shows that \(C_\varphi\) has closed range if and only if there is constant \(c>0\) such that the set \(\{ w\in {\mathbb D}: \tau_\varphi(w)>c\}\) is a dominant set for \(D(\mu)\).