Pairs of Clark Unitary Operators on the Bidisk and their Taylor Joint Spectra

Abstract

We develop a Clark theory for commuting compressed shift operators on model spaces $K_ϕ$ associated with inner functions $ϕ$ on the bidisk, which exhibits both similarities and marked differences compared to the classical one-variable version. We first identify the adjoint of the embedding operator $J_α \colon K_ϕ\to L^2(σ_α)$ as a weighted Cauchy transform of the Clark measure $σ_α$. Under natural assumptions, which generically include the case when $ϕ$ is rational inner, we obtain commuting unitaries on $K_ϕ$ that are (often infinite-dimensional) perturbations of the compressed shift operators $K_ϕ$. We prove that these unitaries are unitarily equivalent to multiplication by the coordinate functions on $L^2(σ_α)$ and then establish a number of related properties and simplified results in special cases. Finally, we show that the Taylor joint spectrum of these Clark unitaries coincides with level sets of $ϕ$ when $ϕ$ is a rational inner function.