2017/06/07 by Gehér, György Pál · 2 citations
#FOS: Mathematics #Functional Analysis (math.FA)
paper · doi:10.48550/arxiv.1706.02329
Wigner's celebrated theorem, which is particularly important in the mathematical foundations of quantum mechanics, states that every bijective transformation on the set of all rank-one projections of a complex Hilbert space which preserves the transition probability is induced by a unitary or an antiunitary operator. This vital theorem has been generalised in various ways by several scientists. In 2001, Molnár provided a natural generalisation, namely, he provided a characterisation of (not necessarily bijective) maps which act on the Grassmann space of all rank-n projections and leave the system of Jordan principal angles invariant (see [20] and [17]). In this paper we give a very natural joint generalisation of Wigner's and Molnár's theorems, namely, we prove a characterisation of all (not necessarily bijective) transformations on the Grassmann space which fix the quantity tr PQ (i.e.~the sum of the squares of cosines of principal angles) for every pair of rank-n projections P and Q.