On the trace of curvature of irreducible Cowen-Douglas operators (Q2122203)

This paper concerns traces of the curvatures and the similarity problem for the Cowen-Douglas class of operators. The Cowen-Douglas class of operators is a subclass of multiplication operators by the coordinate function on analytic reproducing kernel Hilbert spaces that satisfies certain assumptions. One important feature of this class of operators is that they are associated with finite rank Hermitian holomorphic vector bundles over domains in the complex plane. It is then natural to expect the classification of similar Cowen-Douglas operators in terms of curvatures. The problem is still open modulo some development; see [\textit{H.-K. Kwon} and \textit{S. Treil}, Publ. Mat., Barc. 53, No. 2, 417--438 (2009; Zbl 1190.47002); \textit{K. Ji} et al., ``A subclass of the Cowen-Douglas class and similarity'', Math. Nachr. 295, No. 11, 2197--2222 (2022; \url{doi:10.1002/mana.202000326})] and the references therein. It is also evident that, to some extent, the difference in the traces of the curvatures of the two operators encodes the issue of similarity. This is the main theme of this paper. The authors prove that the trace of the curvature of a class of operators (subclass of the Cowen-Douglas class of operators) can be expressed as the sum of the curvature of line bundles. This result answers affirmatively a question posed in [Ji et al., loc. cit.].