Commutators of Operators on Hilbert Space

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to record some progress on the problem of determining which (bounded, linear) operators A on a separable Hilbert space H are commutators, in the sense that there exist bounded operators B and C on H satisfying A = BC — CB. It is thus natural to consider this paper as a continuation of the sequence (2; 3; 5). In §2 we show that many infinite diagonal matrices (with scalar entries) are commutators and that every weighted unilateral and bilateral shift is a commutator.