Some remarks on analytic continuation in weighted backward shift invariant subspaces

By a famous result of Douglas, Shapiro, and Shields, functions in backward shift invariant subspaces in Hardy spaces are characterized by the fact that they admit a pseudocontinuation outside the closed unit disk. More can be said when the spectrum of the associated inner function has holes on \mathbb T{{\mathbb T}}. Then the functions of the invariant subspaces even extend analytically through these holes. Here we will be interested in weighted backward shift invariant subspaces which appear naturally in the context of kernels of Toeplitz operators. Note that such kernels are special cases of so-called nearly invariant subspaces. In our setting a result by Aleksandrov allows to deduce analytic continuation properties which we will then apply to consider embeddings of weighted invariant subspaces into their unweighted companions. We hope that this connection might shed some new light on known results. We will also establish a link between the spectrum of the inner function and the approximate point spectrum of the backward shift in the weighted situation in the spirit of results by Aleman, Richter, and Ross.