Because of Euler’s identity , the complex exponential is not injective:
for any complex
and integer
. As such, the complex logarithm
is not well-defined as a single-valued function from
to
. However, after making a branch cut, one can create a branch of the logarithm which is single-valued. For instance, after removing the negative real axis
, one has the standard branch
of the logarithm, with
defined as the unique choice of the complex logarithm of
whose imaginary part has magnitude strictly less than
. This particular branch has a number of useful additional properties:
- The standard branch
is holomorphic on its domain
.
- One has
for all
in the domain
. In particular, if
is real, then
is real.
- One has
for all
in the domain
.
One can then also use the standard branch of the logarithm to create standard branches of other multi-valued functions, for instance creating a standard branch of the square root function. We caution however that the identity
can fail for the standard branch (or indeed for any branch of the logarithm).
One can extend this standard branch of the logarithm to complex matrices, or (equivalently) to linear transformations
on an
-dimensional complex vector space
, provided that the spectrum of that matrix or transformation avoids the branch cut
. Indeed, from the spectral theorem one can decompose any such
as the direct sum of operators
on the non-trivial generalised eigenspaces
of
, where
ranges in the spectrum of
. For each component
of
, we define
where is the Taylor expansion of
at
; as
is nilpotent, only finitely many terms in this Taylor expansion are required. The logarithm
is then defined as the direct sum of the
.
The matrix standard branch of the logarithm has many pleasant and easily verified properties (often inherited from their scalar counterparts), whenever has no spectrum in
:
- (i) We have
.
- (ii) If
and
have no spectrum in
, then
.
- (iii) If
has spectrum in a closed disk
in
, then
, where
is the Taylor series of
around
(which is absolutely convergent in
).
- (iv)
depends holomorphically on
. (Easily established from (ii), (iii), after covering the spectrum of
by disjoint disks; alternatively, one can use the Cauchy integral representation
for a contour
in the domain enclosing the spectrum of
.) In particular, the standard branch of the matrix logarithm is smooth.
- (v) If
is any invertible linear or antilinear map, then
. In particular, the standard branch of the logarithm commutes with matrix conjugations; and if
is real with respect to a complex conjugation operation on
(that is to say, an antilinear involution), then
is real also.
- (vi) If
denotes the transpose of
(with
the complex dual of
), then
. Similarly, if
denotes the adjoint of
(with
the complex conjugate of
, i.e.
with the conjugated multiplication map
), then
.
- (vii) One has
.
- (viii) If
denotes the spectrum of
, then
.
As a quick application of the standard branch of the matrix logarithm, we have
Proposition 1 Let
be one of the following matrix groups:
,
,
,
,
, or
, where
is a non-degenerate real quadratic form (so
is isomorphic to a (possibly indefinite) orthogonal group
for some
. Then any element
of
whose spectrum avoids
is exponential, that is to say
for some
in the Lie algebra
of
.
Proof: We just prove this for , as the other cases are similar (or a bit simpler). If
, then (viewing
as a complex-linear map on
, and using the complex bilinear form associated to
to identify
with its complex dual
, then
is real and
. By the properties (v), (vi), (vii) of the standard branch of the matrix logarithm, we conclude that
is real and
, and so
lies in the Lie algebra
, and the claim now follows from (i).
Exercise 2 Show that
is not exponential in
if
. Thus we see that the branch cut in the above proposition is largely necessary. See this paper of Djokovic for a more complete description of the image of the exponential map in classical groups, as well as this previous blog post for some more discussion of the surjectivity (or lack thereof) of the exponential map in Lie groups.
For a slightly less quick application of the standard branch, we have the following result (recently worked out in the answers to this MathOverflow question):
Proposition 3 Let
be an element of the split orthogonal group
which lies in the connected component of the identity. Then
.
The requirement that lie in the identity component is necessary, as the counterexample
for
shows.
Proof: We think of as a (real) linear transformation on
, and write
for the quadratic form associated to
, so that
. We can split
, where
is the sum of all the generalised eigenspaces corresponding to eigenvalues in
, and
is the sum of all the remaining eigenspaces. Since
and
are real,
are real (i.e. complex-conjugation invariant) also. For
, the restriction
of
to
then lies in
, where
is the restriction of
to
, and
The spectrum of consists of positive reals, as well as complex pairs
(with equal multiplicity), so
. From the preceding proposition we have
for some
; this will be important later.
It remains to show that . If
has spectrum at
then we are done, so we may assume that
has spectrum only at
(being invertible,
has no spectrum at
). We split
, where
correspond to the portions of the spectrum in
,
; these are real,
-invariant spaces. We observe that if
are generalised eigenspaces of
with
, then
are orthogonal with respect to the (complex-bilinear) inner product
associated with
; this is easiest to see first for the actual eigenspaces (since
for all
), and the extension to generalised eigenvectors then follows from a routine induction. From this we see that
is orthogonal to
, and
and
are null spaces, which by the non-degeneracy of
(and hence of the restriction
of
to
) forces
to have the same dimension as
, indeed
now gives an identification of
with
. If we let
be the restrictions of
to
, we thus identify
with
, since
lies in
; in particular
is invertible. Thus
and so it suffices to show that .
At this point we need to use the hypothesis that lies in the identity component of
. This implies (by a continuity argument) that the restriction of
to any maximal-dimensional positive subspace has positive determinant (since such a restriction cannot be singular, as this would mean that
positive norm vector would map to a non-positive norm vector). Now, as
have equal dimension,
has a balanced signature, so
does also. Since
,
already lies in the identity component of
, and so has positive determinant on any maximal-dimensional positive subspace of
. We conclude that
has positive determinant on any maximal-dimensional positive subspace of
.
We choose a complex basis of , to identify
with
, which has already been identified with
. (In coordinates,
are now both of the form
, and
for
.) Then
becomes a maximal positive subspace of
, and the restriction of
to this subspace is conjugate to
, so that
But since and
is positive definite, so
as required.