Characteristic function of a power partial isometry

The celebrated Sz.-Nagy-Foiaş model theory says that there is a bijection between the class of purely contractive analytic functions and the class of completely non-unitary (c.n.u.) contractions modulo unitary equivalence. In this paper we provide a complete classification of the purely contractive analytic functions such that the associated contraction is a c.n.u. power partial isometry. As an application of our findings, we determine a class of contractive polynomials such that the associated c.n.u. power partial isometry is of the explicit diagonal form S ⊕ N ⊕ C, where S and C^* are unilateral shifts and N is nilpotent. Finally, we obtain a characterization of operator-valued symbols for which the corresponding Toeplitz operator on vector-valued Hardy space is a partial isometry.