Rigidity of weighted composition operators on $H^p$

Abstract: We show that every non-compact weighted composition operator $f \mapsto u\cdot (f\circ\phi)$ acting on a Hardy space $H^p$ for $1 \leq p < \infty$ fixes an isomorphic copy of the sequence space $\ell^p$ and therefore fails to be strictly singular. We also characterize those weighted composition operators on $H^p$ which fix a copy of the Hilbert space $\ell^2$. These results extend earlier ones obtained for unweighted composition operators.