Joint Mean Oscillation and Local Ideals in the Toeplitz Algebra II: Local Commutivity and Essential Commutant (Q3147589)

[For Part I, see Zbl 0958.47047.] For Toeplitz operators on the Hardy space of unit circle \(T\), Sarason proved in 1973 that the compactness of the commutator \([T_f, T_g]\) for every \(g\in H^\infty\) implies \(f\in H^\infty +C(T)\). One of the consequences of the analysis in the paper under review is that the membership \(f\in H^\infty+C(T)\) can be inferred from the compactness of \([T_f, T_g]\) for all \(g\) belonging to a certain proper subalgebra of \(H^\infty\), but there exists no separable subalgebra \(\mathcal S\) of the full Toeplitz algebra \(\mathcal T\) such that the compactness of \([T_f,S]\) for all \(S\in{\mathcal S}\) would imply \(f\in H^\infty +C(T)\). The paper also contructs a proper \(C^*\)-subalgebra \(\mathcal A\) of \(\mathcal T\) such that \(\mathcal A\) and \(\mathcal T\) have the same essential commutant. In particular, the image of \(\mathcal A\) in the Calkin algebra does not have the double commutant relation.