1. Introduction
Almost half a century ago, Rieffel and van Daele [
1] gave a geometric interpretation of the theory of the modular operator, also known as Tomita–Takesaki theory [
2]. One of the origins of this theory is the relation between left and right Haar measures, as treated, for instance, in the book by Halmos [
3]. An analog is the symmetry between the left and right multiplication of non-commuting operators. In the geometric approach, this symmetry is realized by taking the orthogonal complement of the subspaces of a real Hilbert space.
In a recent paper [
4], the geometric approach was reconsidered with an emphasis on the complex structure that is determined by the two subspaces of a real Hilbert space, even in the case that these subspaces have unequal dimensions.
In the present work, this theory is used to embed the tangent spaces of a Riemannian manifold in complex Hilbert spaces. It is assumed that the tangent spaces of the manifold can be decomposed into two subspaces. The elements of the subspaces are said to be typed. The theory of the modular operator can then be applied [
1,
4] to complexify the tangent spaces in such a way that the modular automorphism group leaves the subspaces invariant.
A simple example of a manifold with two-typed tangent spaces is spacetime in relativistic mechanics. In spacetime, there are three directions of spacelike vectors and one timelike direction. In the literature, a complexified spacetime is usually found in combination with a Wick rotation. Note that the Kubo–Martin–Schwinger (KMS) condition [
5] discussed below in
Section 6 is an implementation of such a Wick rotation. The parameter
along the real axis of a complex plane is linked by analytic continuation to a parameter,
, along the imaginary axis. In Statistical Physics, the parameter
represents the time, while
is an inverse temperature.
Another example of 3 + 1 typing is found in Section 3.10 of [
4]. In that example, the complexification of the tangent spaces reproduces the quantum mechanics of Larmor precession.
The formulation of the KMS condition and of the modular operator theory in the second half of the twentieth century were preceded by the fundamental breakthrough of Kubo’s insight [
6] that non-equilibrium phenomena in Statistical Physics, which are usually accompanied by the dissipation of energy, can be linked to spontaneous fluctuations occurring in equilibrium states. This led to what is known as Kubo–Mori theory [
7,
8]. The present work shows that this link between non-equilibrium phenomena and equilibrium fluctuations can be understood in the context of Differential Geometry. Fluctuations as a function of time induce time-dependent correlations which are captured by the linear response function
and its transform, the admittance function
. On the other hand, the time evolution of a system not in thermodynamic equilibrium results in changes in the eigenvalues and eigenvectors of the Hamiltonian
, the generator of the modular automorphism group, as
moves along a path,
, in the manifold
of thermodynamic states.
The main result of the present work is the relation (
25) between the evolution of the eigenvalues and eigenvectors of the modular operator
along the path
and an expression containing the admittance function. Methods to calculate evolving eigenvalues and eigenvectors in the context of Solid-State Physics are reviewed in [
9]. In the present work, the context is more abstract and the emphasis is on the underlying geometry.
The structure of this paper is as follows.
Section 2,
Section 3,
Section 4 and
Section 5 recall known facts about the two subspaces of a real Hilbert space and the complex structure resulting from them.
Section 6,
Section 7 and
Section 8 discuss the KMS condition and Linear Response Theory. The admittance function is introduced. Perturbations of the Hamiltonian are considered.
Starting from
Section 9, the parameter dependence of the tangent spaces is studied. The parallel transport operators are complexified. A suitable basis of tangent vectors is introduced in
Section 10. In this basis, the connection coefficients are obtained by considering infinitesimal parallel transport.
Section 12 presents a fluctuation–dissipation theorem. The final section contains a short discussion of the results obtained so far.
2. Two-Typed Spaces
Let it be given that there are two closed subspaces
and
of the tangent space
of a finite-dimensional parameterized Riemannian manifold,
. Assume that they have the trivial intersection
and that the sum
of the two equals
. It is assumed throughout the text that the tangent space
is finite-dimensional. If this is not the case, then the appropriate assumption is that
is dense in
. Any tangent vector,
, in
has a unique decomposition:
For the simplicity of the notations, the index is dropped further on when the focus is on a single tangent space.
An important result of [
4], originally found in [
1], is the existence of a unique orthogonal operator,
J, which is Hermitian and has properties such that
and that for any
and
, one has
Here, is the real inner product of the vectors and in the tangent space. and are the orthogonal complements of and , respectively.
Note that a pseudometric
G can be defined by
It takes positive values for in and negative values for in and vanishes if and are of pure but opposite types.
4. Complexified Tangent Spaces
In [
4], the complex number
i is defined in
by
with
J being the operator introduced in the previous sections. It turns the product space
into a complex Hilbert space,
. The inner product
of two elements,
of
, is determined by the requirement that it coincides with the real-valued inner product when
and
in
are identified with
and
, respectively, in
.
It is the real subspace of
, spanned by elements of the form
with
in
and
in
. Similarly, let
The complex Hilbert space
is spanned by these two real subspaces, i.e.,
This means that any vector,
, of
can be written as
with
and
in
. In addition, one can show [
4] that the intersection of any two of the spaces,
,
,
and
, is trivial.
The operator
is now defined by
Its polar decomposition is written as
One can show [
4] that the anti-linear isometry
and the modular operator
are given, respectively, by
7. Linear Response and Admittance
For
in
, the
linear response function is defined by the following. (In [
8], the inner product is linear in the second argument. This explains small differences between the expressions here and in [
8]).
Introduce the
admittance function , defined by
It is the Laplace transform of the linear response function rotated by 90 degrees in the complex plane. It is a retarded Green function [
11]. The quantity is important in Physics because it is often accessible for experimental evaluation.
Proposition 2. The admittance satisfies Proof. For
in
, Theorem 1 states that there exists a complex function,
, bounded and continuous on the strip
and analytic on the interior, such that
Through complex integration around a closed loop in the complex plane, one then obtains
As a consequence of the above result, one can define an inner product,
, using
with
being the positive square root of
The inner product extends through complex linearity/conjugate linearity to all of .
This inner product is used in the Kubo–Mori theory of linear response [
8]. Its importance in the context of the manifolds of density matrices follows from being the unique metric [
12,
13,
14] with the property of monotonicity with respect to completely positive trace-preserving maps and with the property that the e- and m-connections [
15] are each other dual with respect to this metric.
8. Perturbations
A self-adjoint Hamiltonian,
, is defined by
. Add to this Hamiltonian a Hermitian operator,
, multiplied with a small real number,
. Then, the perturbed modular operator equals
A proof of the identity which was used to derive this expression is found in [
15], p. 156.
In the
algebraic context of [
8], the vector
is an eigenvector of the modular operator, and the corresponding eigenvalue equals 1. It is not clear whether in the present context 1 is always an eigenvalue. Let us therefore continue by selecting an eigenvector,
, of
with the eigenvalue
. Decompose
with
and
in
. Then, one has for any
in
If the eigenvalue
equals 1, which is the case in Statistical Physics, then the above result becomes
This relation expresses the effect on the modular operator
of a perturbation,
, of the Hamiltonian
in terms of the inner product (
9).
9. Parallel Transport Operators
From here on, the parameter dependence of the tangent spaces is made explicit again.
A connection,
, in the manifold
can be defined [
16] by a collection of parallel transport operators,
. They transport vectors from the tangent space
to the tangent space
along the smooth curve
in the manifold
. Note that
stands for
; whenever
or
appears as an upper or lower index, it is replaced by
s or
t, respectively. The obvious requirements are that
is the inverse of
and that the composition law
holds along any non-self-intersecting path,
. In addition, the derivatives of
along
t should exist in some sense. Covariant derivatives are defined by considering infinitesimal parallel transport. They are treated in
Section 11.
Complex linear parallel transport operators are defined by
The inverse of
is
, and
is the identity operator. The composition law
holds for any smooth non-self-intersecting path in
.
The covariant derivative
of a vector field,
X, along the path
in
is given in terms of parallel transport operators by
A similar expression holds for the covariant derivative , given the complexified parallel transport operators .
The parallel transport operators
of the dual connection satisfy, by definition,
Note the use of the complex inner product from
Section 4 and
not the inner product (
9) of Kubo–Mori theory. The corresponding covariant derivative is denoted as
. It is linked to the covariant derivative
by
11. Connection Coefficients
Up to this point, no differentiability in the manifold has been assumed. Now, the assumption is made that the covariant derivatives of the vector fields do exist.
Let
denote the covariant derivative
in the direction of
, i.e.,
. Require that for each smooth path,
, in the manifold
, the covariant derivatives
exist and are given by
These covariant derivatives can be expanded in the basis vectors. This gives
with the connection coefficients being
.
The r.h.s. of the above equations can be split up into a vector belonging to
and a vector belonging to
. Let
with
when
and
when
. Then, a short calculation, using the definition (
14) of the covariant derivative and using (
20), shows that if
, then
If
, then one has
These expressions show in an explicit manner that the connection coefficients of the complexified connection are complex numbers.
12. A Fluctuation–Dissipation Theorem
Let it be given that there is a smooth path,
, in the manifold
. Choose the perturbation operator
from
Section 8 equal to
where
is a fixed point along the path
. Let
denote a field of the eigenvectors of the modular operator
and assume that the corresponding eigenvalue
is differentiable along the path
. Then, (
12) yields, for an arbitrary vector field,
, in
,
with
and
in
such that
. Note that the expressions for
and
are given by Proposition 1.
Now, use (
24) and
to obtain
The l.h.s. of this expression vanishes when the eigenvalue is constant along the path . If this is the case for all eigenvalues, then the path is said to be adiabatic. The first two terms in the r.h.s. represent the change in the eigenvector along the path. The remaining two terms represent the effect of perturbing the generator H of the modular automorphism group.
13. Discussion
In the present work, the tangent spaces of the Riemannian manifold are embedded into complex Hilbert spaces, . This is performed in such a way that the two subspaces, and , of become invariant for a modular automorphism group after complexification. The two subspaces correspond with two types of tangent vectors. Any tangent vector is a linear combination of two vectors of different types, and the intersection of the two subspaces is trivial.
In Statistical Physics, the modular automorphism group is important because it describes the time evolution of quantum systems in thermodynamic equilibrium. In this context, the two subspaces correspond with Hermitian and anti-Hermitian operators, respectively [
1]. The occurrence of the modular automorphism group in the present, more general context allows us to adapt elements of Statistical Physics. In particular, the admittance function [
8], which plays an important role in the Kubo–Mori theory of linear response, is introduced here. It is used to define an inner product (
9), which is the equivalent of the inner product used in Kubo–Mori theory. The admittance function shows up in the result (
25), which can qualify as a fluctuation–dissipation theorem [
17,
18].
A geometric approach to the modular operator theory was initiated by Rieffel and van Daele [
1]. The strength of this approach is that a few basic assumptions about the two types of the tangent vectors of a Riemannian manifold suffice to reach highly non-trivial conclusions.
Many aspects of the geometric approach have not been touched upon in the present paper. An obvious question to be studied is how geodesics behave in the presence of the two types of tangent vectors. What is the relation between geodesics and paths in the manifold which conserve the typing structure of the tangent spaces? Other questions concern dual connections and merit attention because of their importance for statistical models belonging to an exponential family.