Midpoints for Thompson's metric on symmetric cones (Q522141)

Let \(K^\circ\) be a symmetric cone in a finite-dimensional inner product space. This cone can be made into a Finsler space via Thomson's metric \(d_T\). Points \(x,y\) of \(K^\circ\) are in general joined by more than one geodesic, so the question of describing the \textit{set of all their midpoints} \({\mathcal M}(x,y)\) arises naturally. First, the affine span of such a set \({\mathcal M}(x,y)\) is characterised in terms of a translation of the zero-component of the Peirce decomposition of an idempotent. Next, taking into account that symmetric cones are precisely the cones of squares of Euclidean Jordan algebras, an explicit formula for the dimension of the affine span of \({\mathcal M}(x,y)\) is established under the extra assumption that the associated Euclidean Jordan algebra is simple. Special attention is paid to the cone of positive definite Hermitian matrices, where this dimension is expressed in terms of the number of certain eigenvalues of the matrix \(x^{-1}y\).