Matrices of SL(4, R) that are the product of two skew-symmetric matrices

DOI10.1007/S00006-016-0701-YMaRDI QIDQ2361050zbMATH OpenOpenAlexFDO

Authors Lei Dong, Lei Huang, Changpeng Shao, Yong Wen

Publication date 29 June 2017

Published in Advances in Applied Clifford Algebras (Search for Journal in Brave)

Full work available at URL https://doi.org/10.1007/s00006-016-0701-y

zbMATH Keywords

\(\mathrm{SL}(4,\mathbb{R)}\)-Jordan formJordan formline geometryLorentz transformationsoriented projective geometryskew-symmetric matrix

Mathematics Subject Classification ID

Canonical forms, reductions, classification (15A21) Hermitian, skew-Hermitian, and related matrices (15B57) General theory of linear incidence geometry and projective geometries (51A05) Projective incidence groups (51J10)

Review text

Let \(M_{4}(\mathbb{R})\) be the set of all \(4\times 4\) real matrices and denote by \(\mathcal{SS}(4)\) the subset of all matrices in \(M_{4}(\mathbb{R})\) that are the product of two skew-symmetric matrices, i.e. \[ \mathcal{SS}(4):=\{AB:A,B\in M_{4}(\mathbb{R}),A^{T}=-A,B^{T}=-B\}. \] For \(A,B\in M_{4}(\mathbb{R)}\), we say that \(A\) and \(B\) are \(\mathrm{SL}(4,\mathbb{R})\)-similar if there exists \(P\in \mathrm{SL}(4,\mathbb{R})\) such that \(A=P^{-1}BP\). The paper under review makes two main contributions. By investigating the Jordan forms of matrices in \(\mathcal{SS}(4)\), the authors show with the first main theorem that for any \(M\in \mathrm{SL}(4,\mathbb{R})\), \(M\in \mathcal{SS}(4)\) if and only if \(M\) is \(\mathrm{SL}(4,\mathbb{R})\)-similar to a matrix from one of the six classes, called the \(\mathrm{SL}(4,\mathbb{R})\)-Jordan form of \(M\). The authors describe these classes and observe that the six \(\mathrm{SL}(4,\mathbb{R})\)-Jordan forms have simple geometric interpretations in \(\mathbb{R}^{4}\) (or equivalently in \(S^{3}\)). With the second result the authors show that the matrices of \(\mathcal{SS}(4)\) correspond to \(2\)-D rotations in non-null planes of \(\mathbb{R}^{3,3}\) via the classical Plücker correspondence. The authors conclude the paper by discussing the relationship between Lorentz transformations and \(\mathcal{SS}(4)\).

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Cites work

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Cited in

(1)

• New applications of Clifford's geometric algebra

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