English

An arithmetic-geometric mean inequality for products of three matrices

Spectral Theory 2015-06-22 v4

Abstract

Consider the following noncommutative arithmetic-geometric mean inequality: given positive-semidefinite matrices A1,,An\mathbf{A}_1, \dots, \mathbf{A}_n, the following holds for each integer mnm \leq n: 1nmj1,j2,,jm=1nAj1Aj2Ajm(nm)!n!j1,j2,,jm=1all distinctnAj1Aj2Ajm, \frac{1}{n^m}\sum_{j_1, j_2, \dots, j_m = 1}^{n} ||| \mathbf{A}_{j_1} \mathbf{A}_{j_2} \dots \mathbf{A}_{j_m} ||| \geq \frac{(n-m)!}{n!} \sum_{\substack{j_1, j_2, \dots, j_m = 1 \\ \text{all distinct}}}^{n} ||| \mathbf{A}_{j_1} \mathbf{A}_{j_2} \dots \mathbf{A}_{j_m} |||, where ||| \cdot ||| denotes a unitarily invariant norm, including the operator norm and Schatten p-norms as special cases. While this inequality in full generality remains a conjecture, we prove that the inequality holds for products of up to three matrices, m3m \leq 3. The proofs for m=1,2m = 1,2 are straightforward; to derive the proof for m=3m=3, we appeal to a variant of the classic Araki-Lieb-Thirring inequality for permutations of matrix products.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1411.0333,
  title  = {An arithmetic-geometric mean inequality for products of three matrices},
  author = {Arie Israel and Felix Krahmer and Rachel Ward},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1411.0333},
  year   = {2015}
}

Comments

11 pages, no figures