Generalized Foguel-Hankel Operators

In this paper we introduce a more general class of Foguel-Hankel operators, where the unilateral shift on ${\mathrm{\ell }}^2(\mathbb{N})$ is replaced by a general multiplication operator on the Hardy space $H^2$ . We prove that Peller’s condition is sufficient for the operator to be power bounded, but in general it is not necessary. When the Hankel matrix is the Hilbert matrix, we prove that being similar to a contraction is equivalent to the (a priori) weaker Kreiss condition.