Surjective isometries on Grassmann spaces (Q2437032)

Let \(\mathcal{H}\) be a complex Hilbert space and \(n\) a given positive integer. Denote by \(P_{n}(\mathcal{H})\) the set of all rank \(n\) projections (self-adjoint idempotents) on \(\mathcal{H}\) and let \(\left\| \cdot\right\| \) stand for the operator norm. The operator norm defines on \(P_{n}(\mathcal{H})\) a metric which is called the gap metric. Recall that a Grassmann space is the collection of all subspaces of a Hilbert space with a fixed finite dimension. Since closed subspaces and projections are in a one-to-one correspondence, we may consider \(P_{n}(\mathcal{H})\) (\(n\) is a given positive integer) as a particular Grassmann space. In the paper under review, the authors characterize surjective isometries of the Grassmann space \(P_{n}(\mathcal{H}) \) with respect to the gap metric. The main result is as follows. Theorem. Assume that the surjective map \(\Phi :\) \(P_{n}(\mathcal{H})\rightarrow \) \(P_{n}(\mathcal{H})\) is an isometry with respect to the gap matric, i.e., \[ \left\| \Phi (p)-\Phi (q)\right\| =\left\| p-q\right\| \] for every \(p,q\in \) \(P_{n}(\mathcal{H})\). Then there exists either a unitary or an antiunitary operator \(U\) on \(\mathcal{H}\) such that \[ \Phi (p)=UpU^{\ast } \] for every \(p\in P_{n}(\mathcal{H})\). Note that the above result can be viewed as an extension of the famous Wigner theorem from the case of \(P_{1}(\mathcal{H})\) to the case of \(P_{n}(\mathcal{H})\). The paper has four sections. In the second section, the authors introduce notations and give some auxiliary results. The main result is proved in the third section. The proof is divided into several lemmas and propositions. It is based on the use of the following two results: a noncommutative Mazur-Ulam type result on the local algebraic behavior of surjective isometries between substructures of metric groups, and the result of Győry and Šemrl describing the structure of orthogonality preserving bijections of \(P_{n}(\mathcal{H})\). In the last section, the authors present some remarks and discuss surjective isometries of \(P_{n}(\mathcal{H})\) under some other metrics (Asimov metric, Frobenius metric, and geodesic metric).