Geodesic neighborhoods in unitary orbits of self-adjoint operators of K + C

Abstract

In the present paper, we study the unitary orbit of a compact Hermitian diagonal operator with spectral multiplicity one under the action of the unitary group U(K+C) of the unitization of the compact operators K(H) + C, or equivalently, the quotient U(K+C) /U(D(K+C)) . We relate this and the action of different unitary subgroups to describe metric geodesics (using a natural distance) which join end points. As a consequence we obtain a local Hopf-Rinow theorem. We also explore cases about the uniqueness of short curves and prove that there exist some of these that cannot be parameterized using minimal anti-Hermitian operators of K(H) + C.