1. Introduction
Operator theory on spaces of analytic functions is a classical and active field at the intersection of complex analysis and functional analysis. It focuses on linear operators—often defined via composition, multiplication, or differentiation—that act as transformations on analytic functions and interact closely with the geometry of the domain. These operators capture deep structural properties of analytic function spaces and are central to the study of boundedness, compactness, and spectral behavior. As such, their analysis continues to be a major area of research in modern mathematical analysis.
We denote by
the family of analytic functions on the open unit disk
. The subspace
, consisting of bounded analytic functions, forms a Banach space with the norm
The Bloch space
is defined by
and becomes a Banach space when equipped with the norm
Its closed subspace, the little Bloch space
, consists of functions satisfying
It is known [
1] that
coincides with the closure in
of the set of polynomials, and therefore
is separable.
The Hardy space
consists of all functions
such that
This space is a Hilbert space, with the inner product given by
It is also known that
with continuous inclusions.
Another important space is
, the space of analytic functions of bounded mean oscillation. A function
belongs to
provided that
where, for
,
The corresponding Banach norm is given by
Since
, and for
one has
it follows that
Here
m denotes the normalized Lebesgue measure on
with
. Moreover,
is properly contained in
and the inclusion map is continuous (see [
2,
3]). For
one has
For
, the analytic Besov space
consists of functions
such that
where
denotes the normalized area measure on
. The space is normed by
When
,
coincides with the classical Dirichlet space
, where an equivalent norm is
A space
X of analytic functions on
with seminorm
is called Möbius-invariant if
whenever
and
is an automorphism of
. It is classical that
,
,
, and
are Möbius-invariant; see [
3,
4]. Furthermore,
with the estimate
Let
denote the set of analytic self-maps of the open unit disk
. For
, the classical
composition operator acting on the space
of analytic functions on
is defined by
Composition operators have been investigated in depth; see the monographs [
5,
6] for an extensive account.
A natural extension of the composition operator is obtained by adding a weight function. If
and
, the
weighted composition operator is defined by
Weighted composition operators arise naturally by combining multiplication and composition within analytic function spaces, forming a unified and versatile class of operators. They play a fundamental role in the study of isometries on Banach spaces of holomorphic functions. In particular, Forelli [
7] showed that all isometries of the Hardy spaces
, for
, over the unit disk
, are precisely weighted composition operators; see, for instance, [
8,
9,
10,
11,
12,
13,
14,
15,
16,
17].
An even broader generalization is obtained by incorporating differentiation into the composition framework. Let
and denote by
the
nth derivative operator, defined by
Given
,
, and
, one defines
which is called the
weighted differentiation composition operator. For further developments on weighted differentiation composition operators, see [
18,
19,
20,
21,
22,
23,
24,
25,
26,
27].
A notable extension of this idea was introduced by Stević, Sharma, and Bhat [
28,
29], who studied the operator
where
and
. This operator, now commonly referred to as the
Stević–Sharma operator, can be expressed as the linear combination
Let
and
with each
. Define
This operator, known as the
sums of generalized weighted composition operators, was introduced and analyzed by Stević [
30]. It provides a unified framework that includes many classical operators as particular cases. For instance,
corresponds to the weighted composition operator
, and when
for all
, the classical operator
is recovered. Hence,
unifies composition, weighted composition, and differentiation–composition operators, as well as the Stević–Sharma operator, within a single analytical model.
Research on such operators has become increasingly active. Colonna and Li [
31] investigated weighted composition operators from Besov spaces into Bloch spaces, providing necessary and sufficient conditions for boundedness and compactness. Later, Colonna and Hmidouch [
32] extended these results to operators mapping from
and the Bloch space into weighted-type spaces, offering unified characterizations of both bounded and compact mappings. In a related line of work, Liu, Lou, and Sharma [
33] studied the weighted differentiation composition operator and established boundedness and compactness criteria for mappings from
and the Bloch space into Bloch-type spaces. More recently, Zhu and Hu [
34] investigated the sums of generalized weighted composition operators acting on the Bloch space, obtaining results that highlight the versatility of this operator family.
Building on recent contributions, this paper investigates the operator
acting from
and analytic Besov spaces into the Bloch space, aiming to establish unified criteria for boundedness and compactness that generalize and subsume many known results. In particular, our approach encompasses earlier theorems on classical weighted composition, differentiation–composition, and Stević–Sharma operators as corollaries.
Section 2 addresses boundedness of sums of generalized weighted composition operators, while
Section 3 focuses on compactness, providing characterizations and deriving specific cases. This unified treatment not only simplifies existing results but also reveals deeper structural connections among analytic operators previously studied in isolation.
Throughout this paper, constants are denoted by C; they are positive and not necessarily the same at each occurrence.
2. Boundedness
We begin this section by establishing conditions for the boundedness of sums of generalized weighted composition operators acting from and Bloch spaces into the Bloch space. To this end, we employ the following lemma.
Lemma 1 ([
32], Lemma 3.2)
. Fix and . Then for each there is a unique finite sequence of real numbers such that the functionsatisfies the conditions , for , where if and if . Assume
,
for simplification. Define
Theorem 1. Fix , and let and . Then the following are equivalent.
- (a)
is bounded.
- (b)
is bounded.
- (c)
and
Proof. That (a) implies (b) follows directly from the fact that is continuously embedded in .
(b)⇒ (c) Our first step is to establish that
for all
For
, by the boundedness of
and since 1 belongs to
, then
Next, let
. For
, take the test function
as defined in Lemma 1. Then
and
Therefore, by (
1),
and
. Hence, by the boundedness of
, we get
On the other hand, by Lemma 1, we have
where
and
for
. Hence, from Equation (7) and inequality (6), we obtain
Therefore, if
, then
Thus, by taking the supremium over
, we get
On the other hand, if
, then
For
, we have by (5)
Assume inductively that the statement is valid for every
,
Consider, for
,
. Then
is bounded and
, using (
1), we have
. Therefore
Observe that
Therefore,
Multiplying by
, using the triangle inequality, and taking the supremum over all
, we obtain
Hence, by the inductive hypothesis, (9) is established for
k, which completes the induction. Combining (8) and (9), we obtain that
is finite for
.
Fix
. If
, then
To analyze the case
, we consider the function
By Ref. [
35],
and
.
Moreover, a direct computation shows that for
In particular,
Hence
Therefore
Thus
Combining (10) and (13), we conclude that
is finite.
(c)⇒ (a) Let
. Then, for
, we have
Moreover, by Theorem 5.5 in [
36], for each
there exists
such that
Thus, we obtain
Therefore
is bounded. □
Our next task is to characterize the boundedness of sums of generalized weighted composition operators mapping Besov spaces into the Bloch space. To this end, we employ the following lemma.
Lemma 2. Consider as in Lemma 1. Then . Moreover .
Proof. Let
for
. Observe that
Therefore
Therefore, since
is möbius-invariant, we have
Hence
Moreover,
. □
Theorem 2. Fix , and let and . Then the following are equivalent.
- (a)
is bounded.
- (b)
and
Proof. (b)⇒ (a) Let
. Then, by Theorem 9 in [
37], we have
Furthermore, using the continuous embedding
, Theorem 5.5 of [
36] combined with (
3) implies that for every
there is a constant
satisfying
Thus
Therefore is bounded.
(a)⇒ (b) Since, by Lemma 2, , and following the argument employed in the proof of Theorem 1, the proof of for all proceeds by induction on k.
Next we show that
Fix
and consider the following test function
As shown in [
31],
and
A straightforward calculation shows that for
In particular,
Therefore
Hence
Since
is bounded and
is finite, then by taking supremum of
w over
we obtain
□
As direct consequences of this characterization, we now obtain several corollaries covering important special cases.
Corollary 1. Fix , and let and . Then the following are equivalent.
- (a)
is bounded.
- (b)
is bounded.
- (c)
is bounded.
- (d)
and
Corollary 2. Let and . Then the following are equivalent.
- (a)
is bounded.
- (b)
is bounded.
- (c)
and
Corollary 3. Let and . Then the following are equivalent.
- (a)
is bounded.
- (b)
and
Corollary 4. Fix , and let . Then the following are equivalent.
- (a)
is bounded.
- (b)
is bounded.
- (c)
is bounded.
- (c)
Corollary 5. Let . Then the following are equivalent.
- (a)
is bounded.
- (b)
is bounded.
- (c)
is bounded.
Proof. Note that, by Theorem 1,
is bounded if and only if
Since
, the Schwarz–Pick Lemma ensures that this supremum is indeed finite. □
3. Compactness
We begin this section with a compactness criterion that will be used to characterize the compactness of sums of generalized weighted composition operators from Bloch,
, and Besov spaces into the Bloch space. The proof follows standard arguments, similar to those in (Proposition 3.11, [
3]).
Lemma 3. Fix , and let , , or . Suppose and , such that is bounded. Then, is compact if and only if as for any bounded sequence in X converging to 0 uniformly on compact subsets.
The following theorem addresses the compactness of sums of generalized weighted composition operators mapping Bloch spaces and into the Bloch space.
Theorem 3. Fix , and let and such that from (or ) to ) is bounded. Then the following statements are equivalent.
- (a)
is compact.
- (b)
is compact.
- (c)
, ,
Proof. That (a) implies (b) is an immediate consequence of the fact that is continuously embedded into .
(b)⇒ (c) Assume that
compact. Let
be a sequence in
such that
. It follows that the sequence
, introduced in the proof of Theorem 1, remains bounded in
and tends to 0 uniformly on compact subsets. By Lemma 3
Fix
and recall that
for
Then, by equality (7), we have
Therefore, by letting
and using (20), we deduce that for each
Next we show that .
Consider a sequence
such that
. In this case, the sequence
from the proof of Theorem 1 remains bounded in
and tends to 0 uniformly on compact subsets. Again, by Lemma 3,
Recalling that
and for
,
Therefore, by (12), we obtain
Using (22) and (25) and letting
approach 1, we deduce that
(c)⇒ (a) Let
be a bounded sequence in
converging uniformly to 0 on compact subsets of
. Set
. Then for
, we have
Moreover, by Theorem 5.5 in [
36], there is a constant
such that
Fix
and choose
such that if
, then
and
Therefore
Since
uniformly on compact subsets of
, Montel’s theorem implies that
uniformly as well for all
. As
was arbitrary, we obtain
□
Now, we turn our attention to the compactness of sums of generalized weighted composition operators from Besov Spaces to Bloch Spaces.
Theorem 4. Fix , and let and such that is bounded. Then the following statements are equivalent.
- (a)
is compact.
- (b)
, and
, .
Proof. (b)⇒ (a) Let
be a bounded sequence in
that converges uniformly to 0 on compact subsets of
. Set
. Then for
, by Theorem 9 in [
37], we have
Furthermore, using the continuous embedding
, it follows from Theorem 5.5 of [
36] and (
3) that, for every
, there exists a constant
such that
Fix
and choose
such that if
, then
and
It follows that
Since
converges to 0 uniformly on compacts subsets of
, by Montel’s theorem, so does
for all
. Since
is arbitrary, we obtain
(a)⇒ (b) Assume that
compact. Let
be a sequence in
such that
and fix
. In Theorem 2, the sequence
is bounded in
and converges to 0 uniformly on compact subsets. By using a similar argument in the proof of the Theorem 3, we get
Next we show that .
Let
be a sequence in
such that
. Then, the sequence
in the proof of Theorem 1 is bounded in
and converges to 0 uniformly on compact subsets. Again, by Lemma 3,
Recalling that
and for
,
Therefore, by (18), we obtain
Using (24), (25) and letting
approach 1, we deduce that
□
As an immediate application of this compactness criterion, we derive several corollaries that describe the compactness of important special cases.
Corollary 6. Fix , and let and . BMOA bounded. Then the following are equivalent.
- (a)
is compact.
- (b)
is compact.
- (c)
is compact.
- (d)
and
Corollary 7. Let and . Suppose that is bounded. Then the following are equivalent.
- (a)
is compact.
- (b)
is compact.
- (c)
and
Corollary 8. Let and . Suppose that is bounded. Then the following are equivalent.
- (a)
is compact.
- (b)
and
Corollary 9. Fix , and let . Suppose that is bounded.
Then the following are equivalent.
- (a)
is compact.
- (b)
is compact.
- (c)
is compact.
- (d)