Characteristic function of a pure commuting contractive tuple (Q814379)

Given bounded (linear) operators \(T_{1},\dots , T_{n}\) acting on a Hilbert space \(\mathcal{H}\), the so-called commuting tuple (c.t.) \(T=(T_{1},\dots , T_{n})\) is said to be contractive (c.c.t.) if \(\sum _{i=1}^{n}T_{i}T_{i}^{*}\leq I_{\mathcal{H}}\) , or equivalently, denoting also by \(T\) the bounded operator from \(\mathcal{H}^{n}\) to \(\mathcal{H}\) which maps \((h_{1},\dots , h_{n})\) to \(T_{1}h_{1}+ \dots + T_{n} h_{n} \), if this operator \(T\) is contractive. The authors define the characteristic function \(\theta_{T}(z)\) of c.c.t. by \( \theta_{T}(z) = -T + D_{T^{*}}(I_{\mathcal{H}}- ZT^{*})^{-1}ZD_{T}\), where \(z=(z_{1},\dots , z_{n}) \in \mathbf{B}^{n}\) -- the open unit ball in \(\mathbb{C}^{n}\), \(\mathrm{Z}=( z_{1}I_{\mathcal{H}},\dots , z_{n}I_{\mathcal{H}} )\), and \(D_{T}, D_{T^{*}}\) -- defect operators. The c.c.t. \(T\) is called pure (p.c.c.t.) if \(\lim_{m\rightarrow\infty}(\sum _{i=1}^{n}T_{i}T_{i}^{*})^{m}= O\). The main result of the paper under review establishes that two p.c.c.t. on Hilbert spaces are unitary equivalent iff their characteristic functions coincide. In the case \(\dim \overline{D_{T^{*}}\mathcal{H}} <\infty,\) the curvature invariant \(K(T)\) defined by \textit{W. Arveson} [J. Reine Angew. Math. 522, 173--236 (2000; Zbl 0951.47008)] is determined by \(\widetilde{\theta}_{T}\) -- the function of pointwise radial limits of \( \theta_{T}\): \(K(T)= \int _{S}\text{trace}(I_{D_{T^{*}}}- \widetilde{\theta}_{T}(z)\widetilde{\theta}_{T}(z)^{*})d\sigma(z)\), where \(S=\partial\mathbf{B}^{n}\) is the unit sphere and \(\sigma\) denotes the normalized surface measure on \(S\).