The Agler-Young Class

Abstract

This note introduces a special class of tuples of bounded operators on a Hilbert space. It is called the Agler Young class. Major results about this class include a Wold decomposition and a dilation theorem. The structure of the dilation is completely spelt out. A characterization of this class using the hereditary functional calculus of Agler is obtained and examples are discussed. Toeplitz operators play a major role in this note. An Agler-Young pair arising from a truncated Toeplitz operator is characterized. Thus, we extend results obtained in the case of commuting operators by several authors over many decades to the non-commutative situation. The results for the commuting case can be recovered as special cases.