Weakly invariant norms: geometry of spheres in the space of skew-Hermitian matrices (Q6083989)

Let \(U_n\) denote the Lie group of all unitary \(n\times n\) complex matrices, and let \({u}_n\) stand for its Lie algebra, the real linear space of skew-Hermitian matrices. The authors study the dual norm of a weakly unitarily invariant norm on \({u}_n\), and show the correspondence among unit spheres of both norms by using the notion of polar duality. They show that faces of the unit sphere can be described by unit norm functionals, or equivalently, by elements of dual unit norm in \({u}_n\). In addition, they obtain a characterization of norming functionals, extreme points and smooth points of the sphere. Furthermore, they establish necessary and sufficient conditions for the inequality \(\varphi([X, [X, V ]]) \leq 0\) to be an equality, where \(\varphi\) is a norming functional for \(V\in {u}_n\). As an application, they investigate the adjoint action \(V \to V + [X, V]\) of \({u}_n\) on itself. They show that this action always pushes vectors away from the unit sphere, and it only preserves the norm under strict conditions. In particular, these conditions ensure that for a strictly convex norm \(\|\cdot\|\), it holds that \(\|V + [X, V ]\| \geq \|V\|\), with equality if and only if \([X, V ] = 0\).