Relating two seemingly different definitions of Riemannian metric.

67 Views Asked by At

I've been studying Riemannian geometry from John M. Lee's book on the same. My aim is to understand the geometry of Hermitian positive semidefinite matrices when viewed as a Riemannian manifold.

In Lee's book (and Wikipedia), the Riemannian metric (tensor) $g$ is defined as a smooth 2-covariant tensor field on a manifold $M$. Equivalently, for every point $p \in M$, it smoothly assigns an 2-covariant tensor (which can be interpreted as an inner product) of the form

$$ g(p) \equiv g_p : T_pM \times T_pM \to \mathbb{R}. $$

Due to the inner product nature, one can also denote it as

$$ g_p(X,Y) \equiv \langle X, Y \rangle_p, $$ for $X, Y \in T_pM$.

This is a definition of the Riemannian tensor I'm comfortable with.

However, in the book 'Positive Definite Matrices' by Rajendra Bhatia, he defines the metric via a differential. Here the manifold is the set of $n \times n$ Positive definite matrices $ \mathbb P_n$, and for a point $A \in \mathbb P_n$, the tangent space is $T_A \mathbb P_n = {A} \times \mathbb H_n \cong \mathbb H_n$, where $\mathbb H_n$ is the space of $n \times n$ Hermitian matrices.

The author states that the inner-product on $ \mathbb H_n$ (defined as $\langle A, B \rangle := \operatorname{Tr}[A^*B]$) leads to a Riemannian metric on the manifold $ \mathbb P_n$. He then says that 'at a point $A$ this metric is given by the differential'

$$ ds = || A ^{-1/2} dA A ^{-1/2} ||_2 = (\operatorname{Tr}[(A ^{-1} d A)^2])^{1/2}, $$

where the $|| \cdot ||$ denotes the Hilbert-Schmidt norm defined as $||A||_2 = \sqrt{\langle A,A \rangle }$.

What is the equivalence between Bhatia's definition and Lee's definition of the metric tensor? What is the right way of interpreting differential here ($ds$ and $dA$)? The interpretation of 'differential' I'm comfortable with is the way John M. Lee defines it, where the differential of a smooth function is a particular kind of covector field.

PS. Am I missing any keyword which would help with looking up for references? I think this has to do induced metric, but I'm not sure.

1

There are 1 best solutions below

4
On BEST ANSWER

${\rm d}s$ is a standard notation for the line element ${\rm d}s = (g_{ij}\,{\rm d}x^i\,{\rm d}x^j)^{1/2}$, while $A$ is also used to denote a "global coordinate" on $\mathbb{P}_n$. It is $g_A(B,B)^{1/2} = \|A^{-1/2}BA^{-1/2}\|_2 = \big({\rm Tr}[(A^{-1}B)^2]\big)^{1/2}$ whenever $A\in \mathbb{P}_n$ and $B\in T_A\mathbb{P}_n$. Then polarize this formula to find $g_A(B,C)$ for $B,C\in T_A\mathbb{P}_n$.