PROCEEDINGS OF THE AMERICAN MATHEMATICAL SOCIETY Volume 134, Number 9, September 2006, Pages 2599–2605 S 0002-9939(06)08271-2 Article electronically published on February 17, 2006
COMPOSITION OPERATORS WITH MAXIMAL NORM ON WEIGHTED BERGMAN SPACES
BRENT J. CARSWELL AND CHRISTOPHER HAMMOND
(Communicated by Joseph A. Ball)
Abstract. We prove that any composition operator with maximal norm on 2 2 2 one of the weighted Bergman spaces Aα (in particular, on the space A = A0) is induced by a disk automorphism or a map that fixes the origin. This result demonstrates a major difference between the weighted Bergman spaces and the Hardy space H2, where every inner function induces a composition operator with maximal norm.
1. Introduction Let D denote the open unit disk in the complex plane, with dA signifying nor- malized area measure on D. Recall that the Hardy space H2 is the set of all analytic functions f on D such that 2π 2 1 iθ 2 ∞ f H2 := sup f re dθ < . 0
Received by the editors February 2, 2005 and, in revised form, March 21, 2005. 2000 Mathematics Subject Classification. Primary 47B33. Key words and phrases. Composition operator, norm, essential norm.
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License or copyright restrictions may apply to redistribution; see https://www.ams.org/journal-terms-of-use 2600 BRENT CARSWELL AND CHRISTOPHER HAMMOND
(See [4, Corollary 3.7].) Likewise, every composition operator is bounded on each 2 of the weighted Bergman spaces Aα,with α+2 α+2 1 2 1+|ϕ(0)| (2) ≤ C : A2 → A2 ≤ . 1 −|ϕ(0)|2 ϕ α α 1 −|ϕ(0)| (The proof of (2) is similar to that of (1); see, for example, [16, Lemma 2.3].) When ϕ(0) = 0, it is easy to see that the norm of the corresponding composition operator, acting on either the Hardy space or one of weighted Bergman spaces, is equal to 1. When ϕ(0) = 0, on the other hand, it is quite difficult to determine the norm of Cϕ exactly. (See [1], [2], [7], [8], [10], and [13] for explicit norm calculations; related results appear in [3], [15], [16], [17], [19], [22], and [23].) One problem that has attracted significant attention is the question of which composition operators have maximal norm on a particular Hilbert space. In other words, for the Hardy space H2, one would like to identify the maps ϕ : D → D for which 2 1+|ϕ(0)| (3) C : H2 → H2 = . ϕ 1 −|ϕ(0)| 2 Similarly, for a weighted Bergman space Aα, one would like to determine when α+2 2 1+|ϕ(0)| (4) C : A2 → A2 = . ϕ α α 1 −|ϕ(0)| This question has already been answered in the context of the Hardy space. In one of the earliest papers on composition operators, Nordgren [13] showed that 2 → 2 Cϕ : H H has maximal norm whenever ϕ is an inner function;thatis,when- iθ ever limr↑1 ϕ re = 1 for almost all θ in [0, 2π). More recently, Joel Shapiro [19] demonstrated that, when ϕ(0) = 0, these are the only composition operators with maximal norm on H2. (See [12] for an alternate approach to this result.) Until now, this problem has remained open in the setting of the weighted Bergman spaces, even 2 2 for the space A = A0. It is already known that any disk automorphism induces 2 a composition operator with maximal norm on Aα (see, for example, the proof of [16, Lemma 2.3]). The purpose of this paper is to prove that, when ϕ(0) =0,there 2 are no other composition operators that have maximal norm on Aα. This result is the substance of Theorem 3.3. We remark that the complementary question—which composition operators have minimal norm—can be answered without much difficulty. In fact, when ϕ(0) =0, the only composition operators with minimal norm, either on the Hardy space or one of the weighted Bergman spaces, are those with constant symbol (see [7, Lemma 4.1], [8, Lemma 2.1], [15, Theorem 4], and [22, Theorem 3]).
2. Essential norms H Let be a Hilbert space. Recall that the essential norm T e of an operator T : H→His defined as follows: T =inf T − K , e K the infimum being taken over the set of all compact operators K : H→H.Inother words, the essential norm represents the distance between T and the set of compact operators. It is often helpful to consider the relationship between the norm of an operator and its essential norm. Since the trivial operator is compact, we see that
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