On partial isometries with circular numerical range

Abstract In their LAMA 2016 paper Gau, Wang and Wu conjectured that a partial isometry A acting on ℂn cannot have a circular numerical range with a non-zero center, and proved this conjecture for n ≤ 4. We prove it for operators with rank A = n − 1 and any n. The proof is based on the unitary similarity of A to a compressed shift operator SB generated by a finite Blaschke product B. We then use the description of the numerical range of SB as intersection of Poncelet polygons, a special representation of Blaschke products related to boundary interpolation, and an explicit formula for the barycenter of the vertices of Poncelet polygons involving elliptic functions.