Functional Models and Invariant Subspaces for Pairs of Commuting Contractions

Publication date 26 September 2018

Abstract: The goal of the present paper is to push Sz.-Nagy--Foias model theory for a completely nonunitary Hilbert-space contraction operator

T

, to the case of a commuting pair of contraction operators

(T_{1}, T_{2})

having product

T = T_{1} T_{2}

which is completely nonunitary. The idea is to use the Sz.-Nagy-Foias functional model for

T

as the model space also for the commutative tuple (

T_{1}, T_{2})

with

T = T_{1} T_{2}

equal to the usual Sz.-Nagy--Foias model operator, and identify what added structure is required to classify such commutative contractive factorizations

T = T_{1} T_{2}

up to unitary equivalence. In addition to the characteristic function

T h e t a_{T}

, we identify additional invariants

(m a t h b b G, m a t h b b W)

which can be used to construct a functional model for the commuting pair

(T_{1}, T_{2})

and which have good uniqueness properties: if two commutative contractive pairs

(T_{1}, T_{2})

and

(T'_{1}, T'_{2})

are unitarily equivalent, then their characteristic triples

(T h e t a, m a t h b b G, m a t h b b W)_{T}

and

(T h e t a, m a t h b b G, m a t h b b W)_{T^{'}}

coincide in a natural sense. We illustrate the theory with several simple cases where the characteristic triples can be explicitly computed. This work extends earlier results of Berger-Coburn-Lebow cite{B-C-L} for the case where

(T_{1}, T_{2})

is a pair of commuting isometries, and of Das-Sarkar cite{D-S}, Das-Sarkar-Sarkar cite{D-S-S} and the second author cite{sauAndo} for the case where

T = T_{1} T_{2}

is pure (the operator sequence

T^{* n}

tends strongly to

0

). Finally we use the model to study the structure of joint invariant subspaces for a commutative, contractive operator pair, extending results of Sz.-Nagy--Foias for the single-operator case.

This page was built for publication: Functional Models and Invariant Subspaces for Pairs of Commuting Contractions

Report a bug (only for logged in users!)Click here to report a bug for this page (MaRDI item Q6307350)