1 Introduction
Let $\mathbb {D}$ be the unit disc in the complex plane $\mathbb {C}$ and let $\text {Hol}(\mathbb {D})$ be the space of analytic functions in $\mathbb {D}$ . With $\mathbb {T}$ we denote the unit circle, that is $\mathbb {T}=\partial \mathbb {D}$ . The classical Hilbert matrix is
The matrix $H$ introduces an operator on spaces of analytic functions through its action on the sequence of Taylor coefficients. For
in the Hardy space $H^1$ , $H(f)$ is defined as
It is clear that $H(f)$ is an analytic function on the unit disk, since Hardy’s inequality [Reference Duren17, p. 48]
implies that the Taylor coefficients of $H(f)$ are bounded.
In [Reference Diamantopoulos and Siskakis15], E. Diamantopoulos and A. Siskakis initiated the study of the Hilbert matrix as an operator on Hardy spaces by using the fact that for every $ z\in \mathbb {D}$ , the function $H(f)$ has the equivalent integral representation
By considering $H$ as the average of weighted composition operators, they proved that $H$ is a bounded operator on every Hardy space $H^p$ with $p> 1$ and they estimated its norm. Their research was further extended by M. Dostanic, M. Jevtic, and D. Vukotic in [Reference Dostanic, Jevtić and Vukotić16]. Among other results, they showed that
for $1<p<\infty $ .
The study of the Hilbert matrix operator was subsequently extended to include the Bergman spaces of the unit disc. Diamantopoulos [Reference Diamantopoulos14], Dostanic et al. [Reference Dostanic, Jevtić and Vukotić16] and V. Bozin and B. Karapetrovic [Reference Božin and Karapetrović10] proved that $H$ is bounded on the Bergaman space $A^p$ if and only if $p>2$ . Moreover
Following the classical case, a significant body of research has focused on generalizations of the Hilbert matrix operator, particularly regarding the characterization of their boundedness and compactness, see, for example, [Reference Bellavita, Daskalogiannis, Miihkinen, Norrbo, Stylogiannis and Virtanen9], and [Reference Bellavita, Daskalogiannis and Stylogiannis7] for a recent survey on the argument.
In this article, we study the action of $H$ from $H^\infty $ into conformally invariant Banach spaces. We recall that a Banach space X of analytic functions is conformally invariant if for every $f \in X$ and $\phi \in \text {Aut}(\mathbb {D})$
where the Mobius group $\text {Aut}(\mathbb {D})$ is the set made by all the one-to-one analytic functions mapping $\mathbb {D}$ onto itself, see [Reference Arazy, Fisher and Peetre2]. Main examples of conformally invariant spaces are the BMOA space, the $Q_p$ spaces and the classical Dirichlet space $D$ , while $H^p$ with $1\leq p<\infty $ is not.
In this article, we consider the action of the Hilbert matrix operator from $H^\infty $ into the space of analytic bounded mean oscillation $\text {BMOA}$ and the conformally invariant Dirichlet spaces $M(D_\mu )$ .
The $\text {BMOA}$ space consists of all the functions in the Hardy space $H^2$ such that
where, if $z=x+iy$ , $dA(z)=\pi ^{-1}dxdy$ . With the above norm $\text {BMOA}$ is a conformally invariant Banach space and
The norm $\|f\|_{\text {BMOA}}$ can be expressed by integration on $\mathbb {T}$ ,
For more information about $\text {BMOA}$ , we refer to [Reference Garnett19, Chapter VI] and [Reference Girela20].
Theorem 1.1 The Hilbert matrix operator maps $H^\infty $ into $\text {BMOA}$ and its norm is $1+\dfrac {\pi }{\sqrt {2}}$ .
The boundedness of $H$ from $H^\infty $ into $\text {BMOA}$ has been first observed by B. Lanucha, M. Nowak, and M. Pavlovic in [Reference Lanucha, Nowak and Pavlovic22]. Actually, it is also true that
where $\Lambda (p,\frac {1}{p})$ are the mean Lipschitz spaces (see later for definition).
Subsequently, we fix our attention on the conformally invariant Dirichlet space $M(D_\mu )$ . Let $d\mu (z)$ be a positive, Borel measure in $\mathbb {D}$ . The spaces $M(D_\mu )$ consists of all the functions $f \in \text {Hol}(\mathbb {D})$ such that
where
is a superharmonic function in $\mathbb {D}$ . The most famous examples of $M(D_\mu )$ spaces are the $Q_p$ spaces, see (2.2) and [Reference Aulaskari, Xiao and Zhao3]. An equivalent expression for $\|f\|_{M(D_\mu )}$ is
where
We characterize the measures $d\mu (z)$ such that the Hilbert matrix operator $H$ is bounded from $H^\infty $ into $M(D_\mu )$ .
Theorem 1.2 Let $d\mu (z)$ be a positive Borel measure on $\mathbb {D}$ . The following conditions are equivalent:
-
(i) The Hilbert matrix operator $H$ sends $H^\infty $ into $M(D_{\mu })$ .
-
(ii) $\log (1-z) \in M(D_{\mu })$ .
-
(iii)
$$ \begin{align*} \sup_{\lambda\in\mathbb{T}}\int_{\mathbb{D}}\frac{V_{\mu}(z)}{|1-\lambda z|^{2}}dA(z)<\infty. \end{align*} $$ -
(iv)
$$ \begin{align*} \sup_{a\in\mathbb{D}}\int_{\mathbb{D}}\frac{V_{\mu}(z)}{|1-az|^{2}}dA(z)<\infty. \end{align*} $$
We highlight that the proof of Theorem 1.2 is similar to the proof of the analogous result for the Cesáro operator, see [Reference Bao, Wulan and Ye6, Theorem 1.1]. In addition, for some measures $d\mu (z)$ , we also provide the norm of $H$ from $H^\infty $ into $M(D_\mu )$ .
Theorem 1.3 Let $d\mu (z)$ be a positive, radial, Borel measure on $\mathbb {D}$ . If $H:H^\infty \to M(\mathcal {D}_\mu )$ is bounded then
Significantly, the measure associated with the $Q_p$ spaces satisfies the hypothesis of the above theorem and we are able to compute the norm of the Hilbert matrix operator from $H^\infty $ into $Q_p$ .
The methodology developed in this article also works for the Cesáro operator
The analogy between the Hilbert matrix operator and the Cesáro operator comes from their matrix representations, that is
We observe that $H$ is obtained from $C$ by the following formal manipulation: we erase the zeros in each column of $C$ and we shift up the columns to their first non-zero entry. In rigorous terms, this is equivalent to the following algebraic relation. Let $e_n(z) = z^n, n = 0, 1, 2, ... $ be the monomials, which form an orthonormal basis of $H^2$ . We have that
where S is the shift operator, that is $Sf(z)=zf(z)$ .
Theorem 1.4 Let $d\mu (z)$ be a positive, radial, Borel measure on $\mathbb {D}$ . If $\mathcal {C}:H^\infty \to M(D_\mu )$ is bounded then
In light of the analogy between $C$ and $H$ , a comparative analysis of the Hilbert matrix operator results with their Cesáro operator counterparts is warranted.
The rest of the article is divided in six sections. Section 2 is devoted to preliminary material: we recall the definition of Hardy spaces and we describe the conformally invariant Dirichlet spaces $M(D_\mu )$ . In Section 3, we deal with $\text {BMOA}$ and we prove Theorem 1.1. In Section 4, we briefly describe the action of the Hilbert matrix operator from $H^\infty $ into the mean Lipschitz spaces. In Section 5, we describe the action of the Hilbert matrix operator from $H^\infty $ into $M(D_\mu )$ and we prove Theorem 1.2.
We prove Theorem 1.4 in Section 7. Finally, in Section 6, we prove Theorem 1.3. We conclude the article with some open problems.
We use the following notation. By the expressions $f \lesssim g$ , we mean that there exists a positive constant C such that
If both f ≲ g and f ≳ g hold, we write f ∼ g. The capital letter C, will denote constants whose values may change every time they appear. Finally with $\delta _{m,n}$ we denote the classical Kronecker symbol.
2 Preliminary
In this preliminary section, we recall some definitions that will be used throughout the whole article.
2.1 Hardy spaces
Let $1\leq p<\infty $ and $f\in \text {Hol}(\mathbb {D})$ . For $0\leq r<1$ , let
be the usual integral means of f on the circle of radius r. The Hardy space $H^p =H^p(\mathbb {D})$ consists of all the functions $f\in \text {Hol}(\mathbb D)$ such that
and, for $p=\infty $ , $\,H^\infty $ consists of the bounded analytic functions on $\mathbb {D}$ , i.e., all the functions in $\text {Hol}(\mathbb D)$ such that
See [Reference Duren17] for the theory of Hardy spaces. Important examples of $H^\infty $ functions are the automorphisms, $\phi \in \text {Aut}(\mathbb {D})$ . We recall that every $\phi \in \text {Aut}(\mathbb {D})$ can be written as
where $\theta $ is real and $a\in \mathbb {D}$ .
2.2 Conformally invariant Dirichlet spaces
The Möbius invariant spaces $M(D_\mu )$ generated by the Dirichlet space $D_\mu $ are defined in (1.3)Footnote 1 . In order to avoid that, $M(D_\mu )$ contains only constant functions, we always assume that
If (2.1) does not hold, $M(D_\mu )$ is called trivial. From [Reference Bao, Mashreghi, Pouliasis and Wulan5], it is known that if $M(D_\mu )$ is not trivial, then $D \subseteq M(D_\mu ) \subseteq \mathit{BMOA}$ . Furthermore, $M(D_\mu ) = \mathit{BMOA}$ if and only if $\mu (\mathbb {D}) < \infty $ .
For $0 < p < \infty $ , the $Q_p$ space consists of all the functions $f \in \text {Hol}(\mathbb {D})$ such that
Clearly, $Q_{p_{1}} \subseteq Q_{p_{2}}$ for $0 < p_1 < p_2 < \infty $ and for $0<p<1$
where
and $\Delta $ is the Laplacian [Reference Bao, Mashreghi, Pouliasis and Wulan5]. We have that $Q_1 = \text {BMOA}$ and $Q_p \subsetneq \text {BMOA}$ when $0 < p < 1$ . We refer to J. Xiao’s monographs [Reference Xiao23] and [Reference Xiao24] for more results on $Q_p$ spaces.
3 Proof of Theorem 1.1
It is well known that $H$ does not map $H^\infty $ into its self. Indeed, by (1.1), we note that
and this function does not belong to $H^\infty $ .
Proof of Theorem 1.1
In [Reference Lanucha, Nowak and Pavlovic22] Lanucha, Nowak, and Pavlovic proved that $H$ is bounded from $H^\infty $ into $\text {BMOA}$ . By using the same computations of Danikas and Siskakis [Reference Danikas and Siskakis13, Theorem 1] and the expression (1.2) for the $\text {BMOA}$ norm, we realize that
from which it follows that
In order to prove the upper bound for the norm of $H$ , because of (1.1), we note that
The convergence of the integral and the analyticity of the function f guarantee that we can change the path of integration to
which describes circular arcs contained in $\mathbb {D}$ . Therefore, we obtain that
The quantity inside the integral is $\psi _{s}(w)f(\psi _{s}(w))$ , where
maps the unit disc into itself for each $0\leq s<1$ . Thus, in absolute value,
for each $w \in \mathbb {D}$ and $0\leq s\leq 1$ . Consequently,
where in the last equality we have used the fact that $\|\log (1-z)\|_{\text {BMOA}}=\frac {\pi }{\sqrt {2}}$ , see [Reference Danikas12]. Due to the above inequality and (3.2), we have the conclusion.
The proof of Theorem 1.1 provides a usefully identity for the derivative $H(f)'$ when $f\in H^\infty $ . Indeed
with $b\in H^\infty $ and $\|b\|_{H^{\infty }}\leq \|f\|_{H^{\infty }}$ .
4 Hilbert matrix operator into mean Lipschitz spaces
The inclusion $H\left ( H^\infty \right )\subset \mathit{BMOA}$ can be refined to
For $1 < p < \infty $ and $0 < \alpha \leq 1,$ the mean Lipschitz space $\Lambda (p,\alpha )$ consists all the analytic functions f on the unit disc for which
The spaces $\Lambda (p,\frac {1}{p})$ with $ 1 < p < \infty $ grow in size with p, they are all subspaces of $\text {BMOA}$ and they all contain unbounded functions such as $\log (1-z)$ , see [Reference Bourdon, Shapiro and Sledd11].
Theorem 4.1 The Hilbert matrix operator $H$ is bounded from $H^\infty $ into $\Lambda (p,1/p)$ and
Proof The proof is similar to Theorem 1.1. By [Reference Hedenmalm, Korenblum and Zhu21, Theorem 1.7], we have that $\log (1-z) \in \Lambda (p,\frac {1}{p}) $ for $1<p<\infty $ with
By (3.3), we have that
Consequently
We point out that the exact value of the $\|H\|_{H^\infty \to \Lambda (p,\frac {1}{p})}$ is not provided by Theorem 4.1. However, we are able to compute it when $p=2$ .
Proposition 4.2 The Hilbert matrix operator $H$ is bounded from $H^\infty $ into $\Lambda (2,1/2)$ and
Proof Since in Theorem 4.1 we have already shown the upper bound, we have to provide only the estimate from below. Since $H(1)(1)=1$ and
we have
Since $\|\log (1-z)\|_{\Lambda (2,\frac {1}{2})}=1$ , conclusion follows.
5 Hilbert matrix operator into conformally invariant Dirichlet spaces
We start by proving Theorem 1.2.
Proof of Theorem 1.2
The proof of Theorem 1.2 is similar to [Reference Bao, Wulan and Ye6, Theorem 1.2]. Nevertheless, for completeness, we include it here.
$(i)\Rightarrow (ii)$ . Let $H\left (H^\infty \right ) \subseteq M(D_{\mu })$ . Since $ H(1) \in H\left (H^\infty \right )$ , we have that $M(D_{\mu })$ is not trivial and [Reference Bao, Mashreghi, Pouliasis and Wulan5, Theorem 3.3] implies that
In order to prove that $\log (1-z)$ is in $M(D_{\mu })$ , according to (1.4), it is enough to show that
Indeed
Since
(5.1) holds.
$(ii)\Rightarrow (iii)$ . Let $\log (1-z)\in M(D_{\mu })$ . By using (1.4) and a change of variables, we have that
Taking $a=0$ in the above condition, we have
$(iii)\Leftrightarrow (iv)$ . We set $(1-|z|^2)d\nu (z)=V_{\mu }(z)dA(z)$ and apply [Reference Bao, Göğüş and Pouliasis4, Lemma 2.2].
$(iv)\Rightarrow (i)$ . Let $f \in H^\infty $ . By using (3.3), we note that
where we have chosen
Consequently, $H$ is bounded from $H^\infty $ into $M(D_\mu )$ if
We set $\eta =\frac {\lambda -\overline {a}}{1-\lambda a}$ , $|\eta |=1$ . Through a change of variables, we get
By using conditions $(iii)$ and $(iv)$ , the proof is complete.
Remark 5.1 Let
with $z \in \mathbb {D}$ , $a \in (0,\infty )$ and $\Delta $ the classical Laplace operator. The proof [Reference Bao, Wulan and Ye6, Theorem 1.2] gives that
-
(i) If $0 < a \leq 1$ , then $M(D_{\mu _{a}} )$ is not trivial and $H(H^\infty ) \not \subseteq M(D_{\mu _{a}} )$ .
-
(ii) If $a>1$ , then $H(H^\infty ) \not \subseteq M(D_{\mu _{a}} ) \not \subseteq \bigcap _{0<p<\infty } Q_p$ .
Consequently, there are measures $\mu $ for which $H(H^\infty ) \not \subseteq M(D_\mu ).$
6 Norm of the Hilbert matrix operator into conformally invariant Dirichlet spaces
For particular measures $\mu $ , it is possible to compute $\|H\|_{H^\infty \to M(D_\mu )}$ . We need two preliminary lemmas.
Lemma 6.1 Let $d\mu (z)$ be a radial measure. Then $U_\mu (z)dA(z)$ is also a radial measure.
Proof Let $\lambda \in \mathbb {T}$ . We note that
Therefore
from which the lemma follows.
Lemma 6.2 Let $d\mu (z)$ be a positive, radial measure such that $\log (1-z) \in M(D_\mu )$ . Then
where
Proof We note that
Since $\log (1-z) \in M(D_\mu )$ , the conclusion follows.
When $d\mu (z)$ is a radial measure, (1.3) becomes
Proposition 6.3 Let $d\mu (z)$ be a positive, radial, Borel measure on $\mathbb {D}$ . Then
Proof Since the measure $d\mu (z)$ is radial, we observe that
In particular, by using the power series expansion, we have that
Since $d\mu (z)$ is radial and
we have that
Hence,
With the change of variable
where $|w|=|a|$ for $a \in \overline {\mathbb {D}}\setminus \{1\}$ and $|w|\to 1$ as $a\to 1$ , we note that the function
is analytic in the unit disc. Moreover, since $B(w)$ is continuous in $\overline {\mathbb {D}}$ due to Lemma 6.2, the maximum principle for harmonic functions tells us that
Consequently,
In particular, due to Lemma 6.2, we know that
Consequently
By using Proposition 6.3, we are now able to prove Theorem 1.3.
Proof of Theorem 1.3
As we saw earlier (3.3), we have that
where $b\in H^\infty $ and $\|b\|_{H^\infty }\leq \|f\|_{H^\infty }$ . Consequently,
By Proposition 6.3, we have that
Once again, we recall that
We observe that the function $h(z)=(1-z)f_1(z)$ is in $H^\infty $ with
Let $0<a<1$ and set
where
For $z\in \mathbb {D}$ fixed observe that $\lim _{a\to 1}\sigma _{a}(z)=1$ . This implies that for each fixed $z\in \mathbb {D}$ , $g_a(z)\to 0$ as $a\to 1$ . Since $h\in H^\infty $ with norm M, we have
Moreover
as $a\to 1$ and, by repeating the proof of Proposition 6.3,
Therefore by dominated convergence [Reference Folland18, p. 59; Example 20], we have that
According to Proposition 6.3, we have that
By using (6.3), the last $\liminf $ becomes
This implies that
A significant application of Theorem 1.3 to $Q_p$ spaces with $\|\cdot \|_{M(D_{\mu _p})}$ provides the norm of $H$ in this situation.
Corollary 6.4 The norm of $H:H^\infty \to Q_p$ is equal to
7 The norm of he Cesaro operator
We use the following identity
where $\mu $ is a positive Borel measure such that $(1-|z|^{2})d\mu (z)$ is finite.
Proof of Theorem 1.4
Firstly observe that $C(1)(z)=-\frac {1}{z}\log (1-z)$ . As for the Hilbert matrix operator, this implies that
Let $f\in H^\infty $ . Set $h(z)=z\,C(f)(z)$ , then $(1-z)h'(z)=f(z)$ . We have that
and that $|C(f)(0)|\leq ||f||_{H^\infty }$ . For the integral we work as follows. Let $Cf=g$ ; then
Since $h'(z)(1-z)=f(z)$ and due to Proposition 6.3, we have
8 Open questions
We note that for every radial measure $\mu $ that satisfies (2.1),
However we are not able to compute the exact value of $\|H\|_{H^\infty \to M(D_\mu )}$ in general.
Question 8.1 What is the exact norm of $H$ from $H^\infty $ to $M(D_\mu )$ for non-radial $\mu $ ?
Acknowledgements
The authors would like to express their gratitude to professor Aristomenis Siskakis who point (3.3) out.
They would also like to thank the anonymous reviewer for her/his helpful suggestions which improve the article.