Factorization of staircase class operators in Hilbert space

A class of linear bounded staircase operators(H, G spaces) defined by (1) with two infinite sequences of orthogonal decompositions ofH and chain property (2) is considered. Necessary and sufficient conditions for the factorizationZ=XY are obtained, whereX, Y are block-diagonal, bounded, andY has a bounded inverse. All the pairs (X, Y) are explicitly constructed. These conditions are specialized for finite and infinite dimensions of the blocks ofX, Y and for differentX, Y. A direct application to bitriangular and biquasitriangular operators is indicated.