Preservers of restricted unitary orbits of projections (Q2174410)

Let \(\mathcal{H}\) be a complex Hilbert space and \(B(\mathcal{H})\) the set of all bounded linear operators on \(\mathcal{H}\). Let \(\mathcal{P}(\mathcal{H})\) and \(\mathcal{P}_{1}(\mathcal{H})\) denote the sets of all projections (i.e., self-adjoint idempotents) and pure states (i.e., rank-1 projections) in \(B(\mathcal{H})\), respectively. Given a group \(\mathcal{G}\) of unitary operators in \(B(\mathcal{H})\) and \(X\in \) \(B(\mathcal{H})\), the restricted unitary orbit of \(X\) (relative to \(\mathcal{G}\)) is \[ \mathcal{U}_{\mathcal{G}}(X)=\{ UXU^{-1}:U\in \mathcal{G}\}. \] For \(X,U\in B(\mathcal{H})\), where \(U\) is a unitary operator, let \(U\ast X=UXU^{-1}\). If \(P_{1},P_{2},\dots ,P_{N}\in B(\mathcal{H})\) and \(x=\left(x_{1},x_{2},\dots ,x_{N}\right)^{t}\in \mathbb{R}^{N}\), define \(x\cdot P=\sum_{j=1}^{N}x_{j}P_{j}\). The author studies the following problem: Given a group of unitary operators \(\mathcal{G}\subseteq \) \(B(\mathcal{H})\) and \(\rho \in \mathcal{P}(\mathcal{H})\), characterize the linear maps \(\Phi :B(\mathcal{H})\rightarrow B(\mathcal{K})\) with \(\Phi \left(\mathcal{U}_{\mathcal{G}}(\rho)\right) \subseteq \mathcal{P}(\mathcal{H})\) (here, \(\mathcal{K}\) is also a complex Hilbert space). Note that the injectivity and surjectivity assumptions are excluded. The author solves the problem for a class of abelian groups \(\mathcal{G}\). When \(\dim \mathcal{H}<\infty \), this class includes every abelian unitary group equal to its bicommutant. The main result of the paper is as follows. Theorem. Let \(\mathcal{H}_{1}\) and \(\mathcal{H}_{2}\) be complex Hilbert spaces. Let \(P_{1},P_{2},\dots ,P_{N}\in \mathcal{P}(\mathcal{H}_{1})\) be mutually orthogonal and let \(\mathcal{G}=\left\{ e^{is\cdot P}:s\in \mathbb{R}^{N}\right\} \). Fix a nonzero \(\rho_{0}\in \mathcal{P}(\mathcal{H}_{1})\) and suppose \(\Phi :B(\mathcal{H}_{1})\rightarrow B(\mathcal{H}_{2})\) is a (real or complex) linear map. Then \(\Phi (X)\in \mathcal{P}_{1}(\mathcal{H}_{2})\) for all \(X\in \) \(\mathcal{U}_{\mathcal{G}}(\rho_{0})\) if and only if there exist \(\widetilde{P}_{1},\widetilde{P}_{2},\dots ,\widetilde{P}_{N}\in \mathcal{P}(\mathcal{H}_{2})\) that are mutually orthogonal and \(\rho\in \mathcal{P}_{1}(\mathcal{H}_{2})\) such that either \begin{itemize} \item[(i)] \(\Phi \left(e^{is\cdot P}\ast \rho_{0}\right) = e^{is\cdot\widetilde{P}}\ast \rho \) for all \(s\in \mathbb{R}^{N}\), or \item[(ii)] \(\Phi \left(e^{is\cdot P}\ast \rho_{0}\right) = \left(e^{is\cdot \widetilde{P}}\ast \rho \right)^{t}\) for all \(s\in \mathbb{R}^{N}\). \end{itemize} Here, the transpose is with respect to a basis such that \(\rho^{t}=\rho \). Moreover, one can always choose \(\widetilde{P}_{j}\) to have rank at most one. The paper has five sections. In Section 2, the author presents some preliminary results. Sections 3 and 4 are devoted to the proof of the above result in the special cases when \(N=1\) (here, the author considers general projections instead of just pure states) and \(N=2\). In Section~5, the author completes the proof for \(N\geq 3\). As a corollary to the above result, the author characterizes linear maps preserving \(\mathcal{U}_{\mathcal{G}}(\rho_{0})\) (i.e., linear maps \(\Phi\) that satisfy \(\Phi (\mathcal{U}_{\mathcal{G}}(\rho_{0}))\subseteq \mathcal{U}_{\mathcal{G}}(\rho_{0})\) where \(\mathcal{G}\) is as above) and shows that many of these preservers are of a non-standard form (i.e., not of the form \(X\mapsto UXU^{\ast }\) or \(X\mapsto UX^{t}U^{\ast }\) for some unitary \(U\)).