Inequalities for numerical invariants of sets of matrices (Q1399232)

This paper generalizes norm and spectral radius inequalities for single matrices to bounded sets of matrices. Namely, the following statement which follows from the Cayley-Hamilton theorem: if \(A \in {\mathbb C}^{n,n}\) then \(\|A^n\|\leq (2^n-1) \rho (A) \|A\|^{n-1}\), can be extended to bounded subsets \(\Sigma \subset {\mathbb C}^{n,n}\): \(\|\Sigma^n\|\leq C\;{\mathcal {R}}(\Sigma) \|\Sigma\|^{n-1}\) for a constant \(C = C(n)\), every bounded subset \(\Sigma\) of \(n\) by \(n\) matrices, and every matrix norm on \({\mathbb C}^{n,n}\). Here \(\Sigma^n\) denotes the set of all products with \(n\) factors from \(\Sigma\) and \({\mathcal {R}}(\Sigma) = \lim_{n \to \infty} \|\Sigma^n\|^{^{1/n}}\) in analogy to the spectral radius theorem \(\rho (A) = \lim_{n \to \infty} \|A^n\|^{^{1/n}}\) for a single matrix \(A\). A further result of the paper is the inequality \({\mathcal {R}}(\Sigma) \leq C_2 \max_{j \leq k} \rho(\Sigma^j)^{^{1/j}}\) with universal constants \(C_2 = C_2(n)\) and \(k=k(n)\) depending only on the dimension \(n\), but not on \(\Sigma \subset {\mathbb C}^{n,n}\). The latter inequality implies the generalized spectral radius theorem of \textit{M. A. Berger} and \textit{Y. Wang} [ibid. 166, 21-27 (1992; Zbl 0818.15006)]. The proofs are topological and use geometric invariant theory, as well as the Cayley-Hamilton theorem.