Journal of Function Spaces
Volume 2018 (2018), Article ID 5316275, 7 pages
https://doi.org/10.1155/2018/5316275

Research Article

Commuting Separately Quasihomogeneous Small Hankel Operators on Pluriharmonic Bergman Space

Qi Wu,¹ Chuntao Qin,¹ Yong Chen,¹ and Yile Zhao²

¹Department of Mathematics, Zhejiang Normal University, Jinhua 321004, China
²Department of Mathematics, Hangzhou Normal University, Hangzhou, Zhejiang 310036, China

Correspondence should be addressed to Yong Chen; ychen227@gmail.com

Received 28 November 2017; Revised 17 January 2018; Accepted 28 January 2018; Published 1 March 2018

Academic Editor: Nikolai L. Vasilevski

Copyright © 2018 Qi Wu et al. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Abstract.

We study (semi)commutativity of small Hankel operators with separately quasihomogeneous symbols on the pluriharmonic Bergman space of the unit ball. Some product problems are also concerned.

1. Introduction

Let be the unit ball in and its boundary . Let denote the normalized Lebesgue volume measure on the unit ball . is the Hilbert space of Lebesgue square integrable functions on with inner product:

The Bergman space is a subspace of consisting of all holomorphic functions. It is well known that is a reproducing function space with the reproducing kernel:

for . Let be the orthogonal projection from onto ; then we have

The pluriharmonic Bergman space is the closed subspace of consisting of the pluriharmonic functions on . It is well known that

where ; then is also a reproducing function space with reproducing kernel:

Let denote the orthogonal projection from onto ; then

Using (5), we have

Let be a set of all bounded measurable functions on . Fix a function . The Toeplitz operator and the small Hankel operator with the symbol are defined by

respectively, where is an unitary operator defined by . One can verify that , so we see the relation between the Toeplitz operator and small Hankel operator is

One can easily check , so, by the above relation, we have , and here .

We need more notations. Let denote the set of all nonnegative integers. For multi-index and point , we write

For two multi-indexes , , the notations means that for every and means that

Let denote . Note that if , then .

For a function , is said to be radial if and separately radial if .

Let , . For , if there are and separately radial function such that , where , then is called a separately quasihomogeneous function.

The (semi)commutativity of two operators is an important topic in operator theory. In [1], Brown and Halmos completely characterized the commutativity of Toeplitz operators on the classical Hardy space. From then on, many related works on Toeplitz operators or (small) Hankel operators emerged (see, e.g., [2, 3]).

For the case on the Bergman space of the unit disk, the commutativity is more subtle than that on the Hardy space. References [4, 5] obtained the Brown-Halmos type theorems for Toeplitz operators with harmonic symbols. Many subsequent works studied these problems for special symbol classes, such as harmonic symbols, radial symbols, or quasihomogeneous symbols; see [6–9], for example.

On the harmonic Bergman space, there were some studies focusing on the commuting Toeplitz operators with harmonic symbols [10, 11] or quasihomogeneous symbols [12, 13] and showed that the results obtained are also quite different from the case on the Hardy or Bergman space. Recently, [14] studied the algebraic properties of small Hankel operators on the harmonic Bergman space and got very different commutativity of small Hankel operators compared with the case of Toeplitz operators. So in this paper, we want to continue the work and generalize the commuting small Hankel operators to the higher dimension case.

In order to state our main results, we still need the following notations and facts. Denote as the set

If is a bounded separately radial function, then

where . Let be the set consisting of all which is separately radial. Note that for every we have

where every . Moreover, if , then also each . For details, one may see [15].

We will first investigate when two small Hankel operators with a certain symbols commute. For two operators , , their commutator is denoted by . So commutes with means .

Theorem 1. Let and . Then if and only if one of the following holds:

(i) or .(ii).

Note that , so the above theorem implies that is always a normal operator on . We also note that it is still open when two Toeplitz operators with separately quasihomogeneous symbols commute.

Theorem 2. Let be bounded radial and . Then if and only if one of the following holds:

(i).(ii) is separately radial.(iii) is nonzero constant and .

The above result is also different from the case for two Toeplitz operators with same symbols; see Corollary  5.2 in [15].

In order to get the semicommutativity of small Hankel operators (see Corollaries 12 and 15 in the next section), we turn to characterize when the product of two small Hankel operators is another small Hankel operator. We obtain the following results.

Theorem 3. Let and , . Then the following statements are equivalent:

(i).(ii).(iii) or .

Theorem 4. Let be bounded radial and . Then the following statements are equivalent:

(i).(ii).(iii) or .

We would like to point out that the above main results also can apply to answer other related questions. For an example in point, by (9), we have

so one obtains that when can also answer when .

We will give the proofs of above main results in the next section. Meanwhile, several corollaries also will be deduced.

2. Proof of the Main Results

We first recall some known facts.

It is well known that a bounded analytic function on the half plane is uniquely determined by its value on an arithmetic sequence of integers. In fact, we have the following classical theorem (see p. 102 of [16]).

Lemma 5. Suppose that is a bounded analytic function on which vanishes at the pairwise distinct points , where and , and then vanishes identically on .

We will need a similar result in higher dimensions which is proved by the above lemma. First, we give the following notations.

Let , we say that satisfies condition (I) if there exists a sequence such that , and, for every fixed , there also exists a sequence such that and .

One will easily see that for a multi-index , if and let be the complement of in , then either or satisfies the condition (I). Using Lemma 5, one may prove the following (also see Corollary  2.7 in [15]).

Lemma 6. Let and be a bounded function on . If the set

satisfies condition (I), then .

Let . Set

when and

when . The following lemma is immediately from (9) and Lemma  3.4 of [17] and we will use it frequently.

Lemma 7. Let and ; then, for any multi-index ,

Note that, for two nonzero multi-indexes with , then if and only if and there is no such that . Hence the above lemma gives the following.

Lemma 8. Let with and , ; then, for any multi-index ,

We are ready to prove the first main result.

Proof of Theorem 1. Using Lemma 7, direct calculations show that

when , and

when , . Thus when

combining with (21) and (22), it follows from that

which implies or

holds when , which induces or . In fact, for the sake of simplicity, we only consider the case . Put

if satisfies the condition (I); then, by Lemma 6, we can get ; otherwise will satisfy the condition (I), which by (25) says that the set

satisfies the condition (I); thus, by Lemma 6, again we get .
Conversely, if or , it is clear that commutes with . Now suppose . When and , by (21) and (22), one can easily check

since . When , by Lemma 7, we have

It is clear that the above two are equal because . When and , both sides of equality (28) are zero, so they are equal. Thus, we conclude on the analytic part , which is also true on the coanalytic part with similar arguments when . The proof is complete.

Before we prove Theorem 2, we introduce the Mellin transform which is one of the most useful tools in studying our problems. The Mellin transform of a function is defined by . It is known that is a bounded analytic function in the half plane . In addition, for a radial function , to compute using (13), we obtain

Let , where . Put , then . Let . For every separately quasihomogeneous function , there is unique with such that and

where is a separately radial function. Thus for each denoted as the form (14), we may rewrite , where

Now we can prove the second main result.

Proof of Theorem 2. Suppose . We may write , where , , are given by (32). Using Lemmas 7 and 8, direct calculations give that, for every ,

Comparing the fourth summations in the equalities (33) and (34), it follows from that, for every and , we have

Similarly, comparing the first summation in the equality (33) with the third one in the equality (34), we then get that, for every ,

With the same arguments as above, it follows from that, for every and , we have

and, for every ,

Suppose is a nonzero constant; then, by (30), we have

so (35) gives that, for every , when ,

which induces that for every by Lemma 6. Similarly, it follows from (36) we can get for every . Therefore, we obtain .
In the following, we suppose is not a constant. It follows from (35) and (37) that, for every , when ,

For the sake of simplicity, we only consider the case . For , put

If satisfies the condition (I), then by Lemma 6 we obtain ; if does not satisfy the condition (I), then , the complement of in , must satisfy the condition (I). In particular, we have . So by (41) we have, for ,

That is, when , using (30), we have

Denote

and then is a bounded analytic function on . Moreover, it follows from (44) that when . According to Lemma 5 we thus have , which implies

for every in . If , then it follows from the above that , so it is clear that , a contradiction. Without loss of generality, we may assume . Replace by in (46) and then compare with (46) to obtain

and thus, as in the proof of Theorem  6 in [6], the above equation gives that is a constant, which is also a contradiction.
Therefore, when is not a constant, then, for every with and , . Putting them into (35), we get that, for ,

when . Since is not a constant, then similar argument as before we get ; hence for . With same arguments, using (36) and (38), we can get for . So , a separately radial function.
Conversely, if , then clearly ; if is separately radial, then Theorem 1 gives ; if , a nonzero constant, and , then using (9) we have

as desired. The proof is complete.

Before we prove the last two main results, we should note that, for every small Hankel operator with , it is easy to check that is a complex symmetric operator with complex conjugate which is defined as for , that is, . Hence we have the following analogous result as Proposition  18 in [14].

Lemma 9. Let . Then if and only if , and each case implies .

We also need the following partial result of zero product characterization which has independent interest.

Theorem 10. Let , , . Then the following statements are equivalent:

(i).(ii).(iii) or .

Proof. By Lemma 9 we only need to show (ii) (iii). Write as the form (14). When , by Lemma 7, we have

Using Lemma 7 again we get that the analytic part of is given by

and hence will give that, for each ,

holds for any and . Therefore, with the same arguments as done in the proof of Theorem 1 we can get or for each , as the assertion. We finish the proof.

The next rephrasing of above result is a cancellation law for small Hankel operators with separately quasihomogeneous symbols.

Corollary 11. Let and , . Then the following statements are equivalent:

(i).(ii).(iii).

Now we turn to prove the third main result.

Proof of Theorem 3. By Lemma 9 we only need to show (i) (iii). Write as the form (14). Using Lemma 7, direct calculations give that (21) holds when ,α and

and hence when , , the two equalities (21) and (53) are equal implying that the coanalytic part of must be zero, that is, for all , , .
Now for each fixed , using Lemma 6, the above tells , which yields that . Hence we get , which further gives or by Theorem 10. We complete the proof.

Theorem 3 answers immediately the following semicommutativity for two small Hankel operators with separately radial symbols.

Corollary 12. Let and . Then the following statements are equivalent:

(i).(ii).(iii) or .

The next corollary says there are no nonzero idempotent small Hankel operators with separately quasihomogeneous symbols.

Corollary 13. Let and . If , then .

Now it is left to prove the last main result. We need the following lemma which is a generalization of Lemma  19 in [14] to higher dimension case.

Lemma 14. Let . Then if and only if .

Proof. Put and ; then and are Toeplitz operator and small Hankel operator on the Bergman space , respectively. It is easy to verify that

Suppose ; then . Applying the above equations we get

to obtain , which gives , and so . It follows from that . The proof is complete.

Proof of Theorem 4. Supposing , then by Lemma 9 we get . So Theorem 2 tells that one of the following cases may occur.
Case (a). (.) In this case, we get .
Case (b). ( is a separately radial function.) In this case, by Theorem 3, we have or .
Case (c). ( is a nonzero constant and .) Without loss of generality, we assume . Combining with (9) we have . Hence by Lemma 14 we get .
The remaining of the proof is clear. We complete the proof.

The following semicommutativity is obtained easily by Theorem 4.

Corollary 15. Let be bounded radial and . Then the following statements are equivalent:

(i).(ii).(iii) or .

Conflicts of Interest

The authors declare that they have no conflicts of interest.

Acknowledgments

The first three authors were supported by NSFC (nos. 11771401 and 11471113) and ZJNSFC (no. LY14A010013). The last author was supported by ZJNSFC (no. LY13A010021).

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