Some Convexity Features Associated with Unitary Orbits

Abstract

AbstractLet be the real linear space of n × n complex Hermitian matrices. The unitary (similarity) orbit of C ∈ is the collection of all matrices unitarily similar to C. We characterize those C ∈ such that every matrix in the convex hull of can be written as the average of two matrices in . The result is used to study spectral properties of submatrices of matrices in , the convexity of images of under linear transformations, and some related questions concerning the joint C-numerical range of Hermitian matrices. Analogous results on real symmetric matrices are also discussed.