Sum of self-commutators of commuting operators

Abstract: It is well known that every hyponormal operator on a complex Hilbert space whose spectrum has planar Lebesgue measure zero is normal. In particular, every compact hyponormal operator on a complex Hilbert space is normal. In this paper, we investigate analogous structural and spectral phenomena for so-called sum-hyponormal $d$-tuples on a complex Hilbert space $\mathcal H$, namely, commuting $d$-tuples ${\bf T}=(T_1, \ldots, T_d)$ satisfying $$\sum_{j=1}^d [T^*_j, T_j] \geqslant 0$$. We show that every sum-hyponormal $d$-tuple of compact operators decomposes as the direct sum of a normal $d$-tuple and a quasinilpotent sum-hyponormal $d$-tuple. As a consequence, every sum-hyponormal $d$-tuple on a finite-dimensional Hilbert space is normal. In contrast to the single-operator case, a sum-hyponormal $d$-tuple need not be normaloid. Nevertheless, we establish a multivariable analogue of Putnam's inequality for sum-hyponormal $d$-tuples with commuting imaginary parts. As a consequence, we prove that ${\bf T}$ is normal whenever the planar Lebesgue measure of $s(σ({\bf T}))$ is zero, where $σ({\bf T})$ denotes the Taylor spectrum of ${\bf T}$ and ${s}$ is the complex-linear polynomial with alternating coefficients $1$ and $i$.