Abstract. Motivated by work of Yu.L. Shmul'yan a pre-order and an equivalence relation on the set of operator-valued Schur class functions are introduced and the behavior of Redheffer linear fractional transformations (LFTs) with respect to these relations is studied. In particular, it is shown that Redheffer LFTs preserve the equivalence relation, but not necessarily the pre-order. The latter does occur under some additional assumptions on the coefficients in the Redheffer LFT.
IntroductionIn a 1980 paper [17] Yu.L. Shmul'yan introduced a pre-order relation on the set of Hilbert space contractions, and showed that linear fractional maps of Redheffer type, as initially studied by R.M. Redheffer in [13,14], preserve this pre-order.To be more precise, let H 1 and H 2 be Hilbert spaces. With L 1 (H 1 , H 2 ) we denote the set of contractions from H 1 to H 2 , and, given C ∈ L 1 (H 1 , H 2 ), we write D C for the defect operator D C = (I − C * C) (H 1 , H 2 ). (Actually,in [17] this is denoted by B ≺ A, however, more in line with other pre-orders on L 1 (H 1 , H 2 ), the order is reversed in [11], and we will adopt the notation of [11] here.) Section 1 contains a detailed discussion of the pre-order ≺ and the corresponding equivalence relation ∼. To give an idea, the set of strict contractions form an equivalence class, and strict contractions dominate all other contractions, and if A ∈ L 1 (H 1 , H 2 ) is an isometry or co-isometry, then A forms an equivalence class by itself and A is dominated by no other contraction than itself, see Lemma 1.7 below. Now let K 1 and K 2 be two additional Hilbert spaces and let Shmul'yan proved the following result.