S-regular functions which preserve a complex slice

Abstract: We study global properties of quaternionic slice regular functions (also called s-regular) defined on symmetric slice domains. In particular, thanks to new techniques and points of view, we can characterize the property of being one-slice preserving in terms of the projectivization of the vectorial part of the function. We also define a "Hermitian" product on slice regular functions which gives us the possibility to express the $$-product of two s-regular functions in terms of the scalar product of suitable functions constructed starting from $f$ and $g$. Afterwards we are able to determine, under different assumptions, when the sum, the $$-product and the $$-conjugation of two slice regular functions preserve a complex slice. We also study when the $$-power of a slice regular function has this property or when it preserves all complex slices. To obtain these results we prove two factorization theorems: in the first one, we are able to split a slice regular function into the product of two functions: one keeping track of the zeroes and the other which is never-vanishing; in the other one we give necessary and sufficient conditions for a slice regular function (which preserves all complex slices) to be the symmetrized of a suitable slice regular one.