Rank Constrained Homotopies

Publication date 20 November 2015

Abstract: For any

n g e q k g e q l i n m a t h b b N,

let

S (n, k, l)

be the set of all those non-negative definite matrices

a i n M_{n} (m a t h b b C)

with

l l e q e x t r a n k a l e q k

. Motivated by applications to

C^{*}

-algebra theory, we investigate the homotopy properties of continuous maps from a compact Hausdorff space

X

into sets of the form

S (n, k, l) .

It is known that for any

n,

if

k - l

is approximately 4 times the covering dimension of

X

then there is only one homotopy class of maps from

X

into

S (n, k, l)

, i.e.

C (X, S (n, k, l))

is path connected. In our main Theorem we improve this bound by a factor of 8. By combining classical homotopy theory methods with

C^{*}

-algebraic techniques we also show that if

p i_{r} (S (n, k, l))

vanishes for all

r l e q d

then

C (X, S (n, k, l))

is path connected for any compact Hausdorff

X

with covering dimension not greater than

d

.

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