Agler-Commutant Lifting on an Annulus

This note presents a commutant lifting theorem (CLT) of Agler type for the annulus \({\mathbb A}\) . Here the relevant set of test functions are the minimal inner functions on \({\mathbb A}\) —those analytic functions on \({\mathbb A}\) which are unimodular on the boundary and have exactly two zeros in \({\mathbb A}\) —and the model space is determined by a distinguished member of the Sarason family of kernels over \({\mathbb A}\) . The ideas and constructions borrow freely from the CLT of Ball et al. (Indiana Univ Math J 48(2):653–675, 1999) and Archer (Unitary dilations of commuting contractions. PhD thesis, University of Newcastle, 2004) for the polydisc, and Ambrozie and Eschmeier (A commutant lifting theorem on analytic polyhedra. Topological algebras, their applications, and related topics, 83108, Banach Center Publications, vol 67. Polish Academy of Sciences, Warsaw, 2005) for the ball in \({\mathbb C^n}\) , as well as generalizations of the de Branges–Rovnyak construction like found in Agler (On the representation of certain holomorphic functions defined on a polydisc. Topics in operator theory: Ernst D. Hellinger memorial volume, operator theory: advances and applications, vol 48. Birkhäuser, Basel, pp 47–66, 1990) and Ambrozie et al. (J Oper Theory 47(2):287–302, 2002). It offers a template for extending the result in McCullough and Sultanic (Complex Anal Oper Theory 1(4):581–620, 2007) to infinitely many test functions. Among the needed new ingredients is the formulation of the factorization implicit in the statement of the results in Ball et al. (Indiana Univ Math J 48(2):653–675, 1999) and Archer (Unitary dilations of commuting contractions. PhD thesis, University of Newcastle, 2004) and McCullough and Sultanic (Complex Anal Oper Theory 1(4):581–620, 2007) in terms of certain functional Hilbert spaces of Hilbert space valued functions.