Rigidity of the flag structure for a class of Cowen-Douglas operators

The explicit description of irreducible homogeneous operators in the Cowen-Douglas class and the localization of Hilbert modules naturally leads to the definition of a smaller class of Cowen-Douglas operators possessing a flag structure. These operators are shown to be irreducible. It is also shown that the flag structure is rigid, that is, the unitary equivalence class of the operator and the flag structure determine each other. A complete set of unitary invariants, which are somewhat more tractable than those of an arbitrary operator in the Cowen-Douglas class, are obtained.