Compactness of Semicommutators of Toeplitz operators -- a Characterization

Abstract: Let $T_{f}$ denote the Toeplitz operator on the Hardy space $H^{2}(\mathbb{T})$ and let $T_{n}(f)$ be the corresponding $n \times n$ Toeplitz matrix. In this paper, we characterize the compactness of the operators $T_{|f|^{2}}-T_{f}T_{\overline{f}}$ and $T_{|\tilde{f}|^{2}}-T_{\tilde{f}}T_{\overline{\tilde{f}}},$ where $\tilde{f}(z)=f(z^{-1}),$ in terms of the convergence of the sequence ${T_{n}(|f|^{2})-T_{n}(f)T_{n}(\overline{f})}$ in the sense of singular value clustering. Hence we obtain a method to check the compactness of semicommutators of Toeplitz operators using the matrices obtained from the Fourier coefficients of the symbol function (Toeplitz matrices). The function space $VMO \cap L^{\infty}(\mathbb{T})$ is the largest $C^{*}$-subalgebra of $L^{\infty}(\mathbb{T})$ with the property that whenever $f,g \in VMO \cap L^{\infty}(\mathbb{T})$, $T_{fg}-T_{f}T_{g}$ is compact. In this article, we obtain a characterization of $VMO \cap L^{\infty}(\mathbb{T})$ in terms of the convergence of ${T_{n}(fg)-T_{n}(f)T_{n}(g)}$ in the sense of singular value clustering. To be precise, $VMO \cap L^{\infty}(\mathbb{T})$ is the largest $C^{*}$-subalgebra of $L^{\infty}(\mathbb{T})$ with the property that whenever $f,g \in VMO \cap L^{\infty}(\mathbb{T})$, ${T_{n}(fg)-T_{n}(f)T_{n}(g)}$ converges in the sense of singular value clustering.