Perturbations of operators similar to contractions and the commutator equation
Let T and V be two Hilbert space contractions and let X be a linear bounded operator. It was proved by C. Foiaş and J. P. Williams that in certain cases the operator block matrix R(X;T,V) (equation (1.1) below) is similar to a contraction if and only if the commutator equation X = TZ-ZV has a bounded solution Z. We characterize here the similarity to contractions of some operator matrices R(X;T,V) in terms of growth conditions or of perturbations of R(0;T,V) = T ⊕ V.