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Sunday, October 25, 2015

Invariance of the Gaussian orthogonal ensemble

On page 17 in his book , Mehta proves the following result about the ensemble of symmetric n×n matrices H
  1. If the ensemble is invariant under every transformation HRHRT with R an orthogonal matrix
  2. and if all components Hij,ij are independent
then the probability measure has the form ijdHij exp(a tr(H2)+b trH+c) with a,b and c constants.

I prove here the converse, namely, the probability measure (1) is invariant under transformations HRHRT.
I first prove that the exponent is invariant and secondly that the absolute value of the Jacobian of the transformation is 1.

  1. The exponent is clearly invariant because a short calculation gives tr(RHRT)=tr(RTRH)=tr(H) and similarly tr(RHRT)2=tr(RHRTRHRT)=tr(RTRHRTRH)=tr(H2) where I used the cyclicity of the trace and RTR=1.
  2. The Jacobian of a linear transformation is equal to the determinant of this linear transformation. I therefore need to know the determinant of the linear transformation HRHRT on symmetric matrices H. A bit of work shows that this determinant is equal to (detR)n+1. Because R is orthogonal, it follows that detR=±1 and thus (detR)n+1=±1.

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