Rank of a co-doubly commuting submodule is 2
Arup Chattopadhyay, B. Krishna Das, Jaydeb Sarkar

TL;DR
This paper proves that non-trivial co-doubly commuting submodules of the Hardy space over the bidisk have rank 2, providing a precise characterization and answering a question by Douglas and Yang.
Contribution
It establishes the exact rank of co-doubly commuting submodules and characterizes rank-one submodules as those generated by one-variable inner functions.
Findings
Rank of non-trivial co-doubly commuting submodules is 2.
Rank-one co-doubly commuting submodules are generated by one-variable inner functions.
Answers a question posed by Douglas and Yang regarding submodule ranks.
Abstract
We prove that the rank of a non-trivial co-doubly commuting submodule is . More precisely, let be two inner functions. If and , then \[ \mbox{rank~}(\mathcal{Q}_{\varphi} \otimes \mathcal{Q}_{\psi})^\perp = 2. \] An immediate consequence is the following: Let be a co-doubly commuting submodule of . Then if and only if for some one variable inner function . This answers a question posed by R. G. Douglas and R. Yang.
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Rank of a co-doubly commuting submodule is
Arup Chattopadhyay
(A. Chattopadhyay) Indian Institute of Technology Guwahati
Department of Mathematics
Amingaon Post
Guwahati
781039
Assam, India
[email protected], [email protected]
,
B. Krishna Das
(B. K. Das) Indian Institute of Technology Bombay
Department of Mathematics
Powai
Mumbai
400076
India
[email protected], [email protected]
and
Jaydeb Sarkar
(J. Sarkar) Indian Statistical Institute
Statistics and Mathematics Unit
8th Mile, Mysore Road
Bangalore
560059
India
[email protected], [email protected]
Abstract.
We prove that the rank of a non-trivial co-doubly commuting submodule is . More precisely, let be two inner functions. If and , then
[TABLE]
An immediate consequence is the following: Let be a co-doubly commuting submodule of . Then if and only if for some one variable inner function . This answers a question posed by R. G. Douglas and R. Yang [4].
Key words and phrases:
Hardy space over bidisc, rank, joint invariant subspaces, semi-invariant subspaces
2010 Mathematics Subject Classification:
47A13, 47A15, 47A16, 46M05, 46C99, 32A70
1. Introduction
Let be an -tuple of commuting bounded linear operators on a Hilbert space . For a subset we denote by the close subspace of . Then the rank of [3] is the unique number
[TABLE]
A closed subspace of , the Hardy space over the unit polydisc , is said to be shift invariant if for , where is the co-ordinate multiplication operator on . The rank of a shift invariant subspace of is the rank of the corresponding -tuple of restricted co-ordinate shift operators, that is
[TABLE]
The rank of a bounded linear operator (or, of a commuting tuple of bounded linear operators) on a Hilbert space is an important numerical invariant. Very briefly, the rank of a bounded linear operator is the cardinality of a minimal generating set (see the definition below). One of the most intriguing and important problems in operator theory and function theory is the existence of a finite generating set for a commuting tuple of operators. Alternatively, one may ask when the rank of a commuting tuple of operators is finite.
Prototype examples of rank one operators are the co-ordinate multiplication operator tuple on the Hardy space, the (weighted) Bergman space over the unit ball and the polydisc in , , and the Drury-Arveson space over the unit ball in . Moreover, a particular version of the celebrated invariant subspace theorem of Beurling says: A shift invariant (or, shift co-invariant) subspace of the one variable Hardy space is of rank one.
Computation of ranks of shift invariant as well as shift co-invariant subspaces beyond the case of the one variable Hardy space is an excruciatingly difficult problem, even if one considers only shift invariant (as well as co-invariant) subspaces of the Hardy space over the unit polydisc in , (see however [2, 6, 7, 8, 14]).
The purpose of this paper is to compute the rank of a tractable class of shift invariant subspaces of the two variables Hardy space, , over the bidisc in . In order to state the precise contribution of this paper, we need to introduce first some definitions and notations.
We denote the open unit disc of by , and the unit circle by . The Hardy space over the unit disc (bidisc ), denoted by (), is the Hilbert space of all square summable holomorphic functions on (on ). Also we will denote by and the multiplication operators on by the coordinate functions and , respectively. It is easy to see that is a pair of commuting isometries, that is,
[TABLE]
Identifying with the -fold Hilbert space tensor product , one can represent as .
Let and be closed subspaces of . Then is said to be a submodule if and . We say that is a quotient module if is a submodule.
A well-known result due to Beurling states that if is a submodule of (that is, is closed subspace of and ), then can be represented as
[TABLE]
where is an inner function (that is, is a bounded holomorphic function on and a.e. on ). Consequently, a quotient module (that is, is a closed subspace of and ) of can be represented as
[TABLE]
It readily follows that
[TABLE]
Rudin [10], however, pointed out that there exists a submodule of such that the rank of is not finite (see also [7], [12] and [13]).
A quotient module of is doubly commuting if , where and . A submodule of is co-doubly commuting if the quotient module is doubly commuting.
The following useful characterization of co-doubly commuting submodules is essential for our study (see [9, 11]): If is a quotient module of , then is a doubly commuting quotient module if and only if
[TABLE]
for some quotient modules and of .
Let be a non-zero co-doubly commuting submodule. If , for some , then it is easy to see that
[TABLE]
Now let both and be non-trivial quotient modules of , that is, , . Then there exist inner functions such that and . The main purpose of the present paper is to prove that (see Theorem 2.1)
[TABLE]
As a consequence of this, we give a complete and affirmative answer to a conjecture of Douglas and Yang (see page 220 [4]): If is a rank one co-doubly commuting submodule, then for some one variable inner function .
2. Proof of the main result
We begin with a simple but crucial observation on the rank of a joint semi-invariant subspace of a commuting tuple of operators.
Lemma 2.1*.*
Let be an -tuple of commuting operators on a Hilbert space . Let and be two joint -invariant subspaces of and . If , then
[TABLE]
Proof.
Let be the right side of the above inequality. Let be a generating set for . Clearly, for all . This yields
[TABLE]
It hence follows that is a generating set for . This completes the proof. ∎
We now prove the main result of this paper.
Theorem 2.1**.**
Let be two inner functions. If
[TABLE]
then .
Proof.
Let . Since
[TABLE]
and
[TABLE]
it follows that
[TABLE]
Since by Theorem 6.2 of [1], , we only need to show that . Set
[TABLE]
It follows that
[TABLE]
Since is a submodule of , by Lemma 2.1, it follows that
[TABLE]
Note that
[TABLE]
and hence, an easy calculation yields
[TABLE]
and
[TABLE]
Therefore it follows from the above equalities that is a joint invariant subspace of . Set
[TABLE]
Notice that for any inner function , we have
[TABLE]
From this and the representation of it follows that
[TABLE]
Then Lemma 2.1 and (2.1) implies that
[TABLE]
To finish the proof of the theorem it is now enough to prove the following:
[TABLE]
Equivalently, it is enough to prove that the set , for any , is not a generating set corresponding to . Equivalently, given , we show that there exists such that
[TABLE]
To this end, let and be orthonormal bases of and , respectively, and let where
[TABLE]
, and
[TABLE]
Again we observe that for any inner function and we have
[TABLE]
where . This follows from the fact that is a bounded holomorphic function on and for all (which gives that ), and then in for all (which gives that ). It should be noted that , where the conjugation map , , is called a -symmetry and it is used extensively in the study of Toeplitz operators on model spaces (for more details see [5]).
Coming back to our context, this immediately yields that
[TABLE]
and hence , where
[TABLE]
and
[TABLE]
Set
[TABLE]
Then and for every we have
[TABLE]
We have thus shown that is not a minimal generating subset of with respect to as desired. ∎
As a consequence of the above theorem we have the following corollary which provides an affirmative answer of the question raised by Douglas and Yang [4].
Corollary 2.2*.*
Let be a co-doubly commuting submodule of . Then rank if and only if for some one variable inner function .
Proof.
If for some one variable inner function , then and hence rank . To prove the the sufficient part let be a rank one co-doubly commuting submodule of . Then there exist quotient modules and of such that (see [9, 11])
[TABLE]
Since rank , it follows from Theorem 2.1 that , for some . This shows that
[TABLE]
for some inner functions . This concludes the proof of the corollary. ∎
There is now the following interesting and natural question: Let and let be inner functions. Is then
[TABLE]
Our present approach does not seem to work for case.
Acknowledgement: The first named author acknowledge Fulbright-Nehru Postdoctoral Research Fellowship (Award No. 2164/FNPDR/2016) and University of New Mexico for warm hospitality. The second author’s research work is supported by DST-INSPIRE Faculty Fellowship No. DST/INSPIRE/04/2015/001094. The research of the third author is supported in part by NBHM (National Board of Higher Mathematics, India) Research Grant NBHM/R.P.64/2014.
The reference list from the paper itself. Each links out to its DOI / PubMed record.
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- 2[2] A. Chattopadhyay, B.K. Das and J. Sarkar, Star-generating vectors of Rudin’s quotient modules , J. Funct. Anal. 267 (2014), 4341- 4360.
- 3[3] R. Douglas and V. Paulsen, Hilbert Modules over Function Algebras , Research Notes in Mathematics Series, 47, Longman, Harlow, 1989.
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- 5[5] S. R. Garcia, Conjugation and Clark operators , Recent advances in operator-related function theory, Contemp. Math., vol. 393, Amer. Math. Soc., Providence, RI, 2006, pp. 67 -111.
- 6[6] K. J. Izuchi, K. H. Izuchi and Y. Izuchi, Blaschke products and the rank of backward shift invariant subspaces over the bidisk , J. Funct. Anal. 261 (2011), no. 6, 1457 -1468.
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