Essentially Hankel Operators (Q4466465)

The setting for this paper is the Hardy space \(H^2\) of the unit disk. Let \(S\) be the forward shift, i.e., the operator of multiplication by \(z\). The essential commutant (denoted by essToep) of \(S\), which has been the object of the study for several years, has sometimes been referred to as the set of essentially Toeplitz operators. Namely, a bounded linear operator \(T\) is essentially Toeplitz if \(TS-ST\) is compact. In this paper, the author introduces the corresponding notion of essentially Hankel operators. More explicitly, a bounded linear operator \(H\) is said to be essentially Hankel if \(S^*H-HS\) is compact. The author then observes the following basic properties of essHank, the set of all essentially Hankel operators. (1) essHank is not an algebra, but a norm-closed self-adjoint vector space. (2) The sets \(\text{essToep}\cap\text{essHank}\) and \(\text{essToep}+\text{essHank}\) are \(C^*\)-algebras. The result for the latter set has been independently proved by \textit{K. Guo, J. Li} and \textit{Y. Zhang} [Chin. Sci. Bull. 44, 204--207 (1999; Zbl 1062.46502)]. (3) There are nontrivial (meaning ``not just compact perturbations of Hankel operators'') essentially Hankel operators even with trivial index functions. This shows that the classical Brown--Douglas--Fillmore theorem for essentially normal operators does not have an analogue for essentially Hankel operators.