Cowen-Douglas operators on quaternionic Hilbert spaces

Abstract

In 1978, M. J. Cowen and R. G. Douglas introduced a class of geometric operators (known as Cowen-Douglas class of operators) and associated a Hermitian holomorphic vector bundle to such operators. In this paper, after giving some basic properties of $S$-spectrum and right eigenvalues of bounded right linear operators on separable quaternionic Hilbert spaces, we generalize the class of Cowen-Douglas operators to the quaternionic Hilbert space via the $S$-spectrum and denote this class as $B_n^s(Ω_q)$. Due to the lack of commutativity of quaternion multiplication, the quaternionic Cowen-Douglas operators are not trivial generalizations of the classical Cowen-Douglas operators. Each operator in $B_n^{s}(Ω_q)$ corresponds to an $n$-dimensional Hermitian right holomorphic quaternionic vector bundle. We first establish a rigidity theorem for Hermitian right holomorphic quaternionic vector bundles. It is then proven that two operators in $B_n^{s}(Ω_q)$ are quaternion unitarily equivalent if and only if the associate bundles are equivalent as Hermitian right holomorphic quaternionic vector bundles. In particular, we introduce canonical matrix representations of operators in $B_1^{s}(Ω_q)$ and furthermore, we give the quaternion unitarily equivalent classification of $B_1^{s}(Ω_q)$ by the canonical matrix representations. It is worth noting that curvature is a complete unitary invariant for the classical (complex) Cowen-Douglas operators, however, there exist two quaternionic Cowen-Douglas operators which have the same curvature but are not quaternion unitarily equivalent. In addition, we prove that the operators in $B_1^{s}(Ω_q)$ are quaternion unitarily equivalent if and only if their complex representations are unitarily equivalent. Some relevant examples of the above results are also provided.