Kwong matrices and operator monotone functions on (0,1) (Q376898)

Let \(D=\mathrm{diag}(d_1,d_2,\dots ,d_n)\) be a diagonal matrix whose diagonal entries belong to an interval \(I\). For any real valued function \(f\), let \(f(d_1),f(d_2),\dots, f(d_n)\) be the diagonal entries of the diagonal matrix \(f(D)\). For a Hermitian matrix matrix \(A\) whose eigenvalues \(d_j\) belong to \(I\), we define \(f(A)=Uf(D)U^*\), where \(U\) is a unitary matrix such that \(A=UDU^*\) with \(D\) being a diagonal matrix. Let \(A \leq B\) signify the fact that \(A\) and \(B\) are Hermitian and \(B-A\) is positive definite. This relation defines a partial order on Hermitian matrices. A function \(f\) is said to be operator monotone on \((0,\infty)\) if \(A \leq B \Longrightarrow f(A) \leq f(B)\), where \(A\) and \(B\) are (square matrices) of any order. Let \(f\) be a real valued continuously differentiable function defined on an interval \(I \subseteq (0,\infty)\) and \(n\) distinct real numbers \(t_1,t_2, \dots, t_n \in I\) be chosen. The Kwong matrix, denoted by \(K_f(t_1,t_2,\dots, t_n)\), is the matrix whose \((i,j)\)-th entry is defined by \(\frac{f(t_i)+f(t_j)}{t_i+t_j}\). The main result of the present paper is the following: If \(f\) is a concave operator monotone function on \((0,1)\), then the Kwong matrices are positive semidefinite for all \(n\).