Generalized interpolation in with a complexity constraint

In a seminal paper, Sarason generalized some classical interpolation problems for functions on the unit disc to problems concerning lifting onto of an operator that is defined on ( is an inner function) and commutes with the (compressed) shift . In particular, he showed that interpolants (i.e., such that ) having norm equal to exist, and that in certain cases such an is unique and can be expressed as a fraction with . In this paper, we study interpolants that are such fractions of functions and are bounded in norm by (assuming that , in which case they always exist). We parameterize the collection of all such pairs and show that each interpolant of this type can be determined as the unique minimum of a convex functional. Our motivation stems from the relevance of classical interpolation to circuit theory, systems theory, and signal processing, where is typically a finite Blaschke product, and where the quotient representation is a physically meaningful complexity constraint.