UMD Banach spaces and square functions associated with heat semigroups for Schr\'odinger and Laguerre operators

In this paper we define square functions (also called Littlewood-Paley-Stein functions) associated with heat semigroups for Schr\"odinger and Laguerre operators acting on functions which take values in UMD Banach spaces. We extend classical (scalar) L^p-boundedness properties for the square functions to our Banach valued setting by using \gamma-radonifying operators. We also prove that these L^p-boundedness properties of the square functions actually characterize the Banach spaces having the UMD property.