English

Dagger-Drazin Inverses

Category Theory 2025-08-25 v3 Quantum Physics

Abstract

Drazin inverses are a special kind of generalized inverses that can be defined for endomorphisms in any category. A natural question to ask is whether one can somehow extend the notion of Drazin inverse to arbitrary maps - not simply endomorphisms. It turns out that this is possible and, indeed, natural to do so for dagger categories. This paper, thus, introduces the notion of a dagger-Drazin inverse, which is a new kind of generalized inverse appropriate for arbitrary maps in a dagger category. This inverse is closely related to the Drazin inverse, for having dagger-Drazin inverses is equivalent to asking that positive maps have Drazin inverses. Moreover, dagger-Drazin inverses are also closely related to Moore-Penrose inverses as we observe that a map has a Moore-Penrose inverse if and only if it is a Drazin inverse. Furthermore, we explain how Drazin inverses of opposing pairs correspond precisely to dagger-Drazin inverses in cofree dagger categories. We also give examples of dagger-Drazin inverses for matrices over (involutive) fields, bounded linear operators, and partial injections.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2502.05306,
  title  = {Dagger-Drazin Inverses},
  author = {Robin Cockett and Jean-Simon Pacaud Lemay and Priyaa Varshinee Srinivasan},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2502.05306},
  year   = {2025}
}

Comments

In Proceedings QPL 2025, arXiv:2508.13619

R2 v1 2026-06-28T21:36:50.700Z