Existence and uniqueness of the Karcher mean on unital C^-algebras

DOI10.1016/J.JMAA.2019.123625MaRDI QIDQ2287221zbMATH OpenOpenAlexFDO

Publication date 20 January 2020

Published in Journal of Mathematical Analysis and Applications (Search for Journal in Brave)

Full work available at URL https://arxiv.org/abs/1901.09776

\(C^{\ast}\)-algebra barycenter Karcher equation Karcher mean

Operator means involving linear operators, shorted linear operators, etc. (47A64) Convex sets and cones of operators (47L07) Probability measures on topological spaces (60B05)

Abstract: The Karcher mean on the cone

O m e g a

of invertible positive elements of the

C^{*}

-algebra

m a t h c a l B (E)

of bounded operators on a Hilbert space

E

has recently been extended to a contractive barycentric map on the space of

L^{1}

- probability measures on

O m e g a

. In this paper we first show that the barycenter satisfies the Karcher equation and then establish the uniqueness of the solution. Next we establish that the Karcher mean is real analytic in each of its coordinates, and use this fact to show that boththe Karcher mean and Karcher barycenter map exist and are unique on any unital

C^{*}

-algebra. The proof depends crucially on a recent result of the author giving a converse of the inverse function theorem.

Review text

The purpose of this paper is to extend the theory of the Karcher means to the cone of invertible positive elements in a unital \(C^{\ast}\)-algebra \(\mathbb{A}\). Let \(\mathcal{H}(\mathbb{A})\) be the set of all Hermitian elements endowed with the norm metric and topology and let \(\Omega\) be the open cone of positive invertible elements in \(\mathbb{A}\), endowed with the Thompson metric \(d(x,y)=\left\Vert \log(x^{-1/2}yx^{-1/2})\right\Vert \). This metric makes \(\Omega\) a complete metric space and, moreover, the Thompson metric topology agrees with the relative norm topology. The Karcher mean (or least squares mean) \(x=\Lambda(\mathbf{\omega},\mathbf{a})\) of a string \(\mathbf{a}=(a_{1},\dots,a_{n})\in\) \(\Omega^{n}\) and weight \(\mathbf{\omega}=(w_{1},\dots,w_{n})\) (with entries non-negative real numbers summing to 1) is defined via Theorem 7.4 as the unique solution in \(\Omega\) of the Karcher equation \(\sum_{i=1}^{n}w_{i}\log\left( x^{-1/2}a_{i}x^{-1/2}\right) =0\). Let \(\mathcal{P}^{1}(\Omega)\) be the set of Borel probability measures \(\mu\) on \(\Omega\) with finite first moment, that is, for some (and hence for all) \(y\in\Omega,\) we have \(\int_{\Omega}d(x,y)\,\mathrm{d}\mu(x)<\infty\). The Karcher mean can be extended by density from the set of finitely supported probability measures to \(\mathcal{P}^{1}(\Omega)\) (see the Appendix), thus providing a contractive map \(\Lambda:\mathcal{P}^{1}(\Omega)\rightarrow\Omega\) (from the Wasserstein metric to the Thompson metric) called the Karcher barycenter map. In addition, if \(\mu\in \mathcal{P}^{1}(\Omega)\), then \(x=\Lambda(\mu)\) is the unique solution of the Karcher equation \(\int_{\Omega}\log (x^{-1/2}yx^{-1/2})\,\mathrm{d}\mu(y)=0\). One basic tool is the fact (proved in Section~6) that the Karcher mean is separately real analytic in each of its coordinates. As the author mentions in the Introduction, this extension was also proved, using a different argument, by \textit{Y.-D. Lim} and \textit{M. Pálfia} [Adv. Math. 376, Article ID 107435, 46 p. (2021; Zbl 1482.47143)].

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