“…Our interest in this set and its inhabitants, the holomorphic functions on Ω, first arose in connection with previous work [7,10,12,28,41,43] on canonical Wick-type star products in strict deformation quantization of the unit disk and the Riemann sphere, and from our desire to understand the somehow mysterious role played by Ω and, in particular, by its function-theoretic properties in this regard. A partial explanation was given in [19], where it was indicated that invariant differential operators of Peschl-Minda type, on the one hand, effectively facilitate and unify the study of the star products on the disk and the sphere, and on the other hand, are perhaps best understood as operators acting on the spaces of holomorphic functions on Ω and its three distinguished subdomains. We started wondering whether and how the most basic differential operator acting on Ω, the invariant Laplacian Δ zw , and its spectral theory possibly fit into this emerging picture.…”