Subvarieties of the tetrablock and von Neumann's inequality

Abstract: We show an interplay between the complex geometry of the tetrablock $\mathbb E$ and the commuting triples of operators having $\overline{\mathbb E}$ as a spectral set. We prove that every distinguished variety in the tetrablock is one-dimensional and can be represented as \begin{equation}\label{eqn:1} \Omega={ (x_1,x_2,x_3)\in \mathbb E \,:\, (x_1,x_2) \in \sigma_T(A_1^*+x_3A_2\,,\, A_2^*+x_3A_1) }, \end{equation} where $A_1,A_2$ are commuting square matrices of the same order satisfying $[A_1^,A_1]=[A_2^,A_2]$ and a norm condition. The converse also holds, i.e, a set of the form (\ref{eqn:1}) is always a distinguished variety in $\mathbb E$. We show that for a triple of commuting operators $\Upsilon = (T_1,T_2,T_3)$ having $\overline{\mathbb E}$ as a spectral set, there is a one-dimensional subvariety $\Omega_{\Upsilon}$ of $\overline{\mathbb E}$ depending on $\Upsilon$ such that von-Neumann's inequality holds, i.e, [ f(T_1,T_2,T_3)\leq \sup_{(x_1,x_2,x_3)\in\Omega_{\Upsilon}}\, |f(x_1,x_2,x_3)|, ] for any holomorphic polynomial $f$ in three variables, provided that $T_3^n\rightarrow 0$ strongly as $n\rightarrow \infty$. The variety $\Omega_\Upsilon$ has been shown to have representation like (\ref{eqn:1}), where $A_1,A_2$ are the unique solutions of the operator equations \begin{gather*} T_1-T_2^*T_3=(I-T_3^*T_3)^{\frac{1}{2}}X_1(I-T_3^*T_3)^{\frac{1}{2}} \text{ and } \ T_2-T_1^*T_3=(I-T_3^*T_3)^{\frac{1}{2}}X_2(I-T_3^*T_3)^{\frac{1}{2}}. \end{gather*} We also show that under certain condition, $\Omega_{\Upsilon}$ is a distinguished variety in $\mathbb E$. We produce an explicit dilation and a concrete functional model for such a triple $(T_1,T_2,T_3)$ in which the unique operators $A_1,A_2$ play the main role. Also, we describe a connection of this theory with the distinguished varieties in the bidisc and in the symmetrized bidisc.