Model theory for hyponormal contractions (Q1974667)

The paper studies the family of hyponormal contractions in view of Agler's model theory. Here a family \({\mathcal F}\) refers specifically to a class of operators on various Hilbert spaces which are uniformly bounded, and are closed under arbitrary direct sums, restrictions to invariant subspaces, and unital \(*\)-representations. The main undertaking in model theory is to identify the smallest subclass \(\partial\) of \({\mathcal F}\), called the boundary of \({\mathcal F}\), so that every operator in \({\mathcal F}\) is the restriction of some operator in \(\partial\) to an invariant subspace. To determine \(\partial\), it is advantageous to identify first the extremals of \({\mathcal F}\). These are operators in \({\mathcal F}\) for which whenever \(\left[\begin{smallmatrix} A & B\\ 0 & C\end{smallmatrix}\right]\) is in \({\mathcal F}\), \(B\) must be zero. It is known that \(\partial\) is the closure of the extremals with respect to taking direct sums, restrictions to reducing subspaces, and unital \(*\)-representations. In this paper, the authors give a criterion for an operator \(A\) in the family \({\mathcal F}\) of hyponormal contractions to be extremal, namely, \(A\) should satisfy \(\text{ran}(A^*[A^*, A]^{1/2})\cap\text{ran}[A^*, A]^{1/2}= \{0\}\) and \(\text{ker }A^*\cap \text{ran}[A^*, A]^{1/2}= \{0\}\), where \([A^*, A]\) denotes \(A^*A- AA^*\). This is then used to show that the boundary of \({\mathcal F}\) coincides with \({\mathcal F}\). In particular, this gives a family whose extremals and boundary don't coincide.