Canonical sphere bundles of the Grassmann manifold

Abstract

For a given Hilbert space $$\mathcal H$$ , consider the space of self-adjoint projections $$\mathcal P(\mathcal H)$$ . In this paper we study the differentiable structure of a canonical sphere bundle over $$\mathcal P(\mathcal H)$$ given by $$\begin{aligned} \mathcal R=\{\, (P,f)\in \mathcal P(\mathcal H)\times \mathcal H \, : \, Pf=f , \, \Vert f\Vert =1\, \}. \end{aligned}$$ We establish the smooth action on $$\mathcal R$$ of the group of unitary operators of $$\mathcal H$$ , and it thereby turns out that the connected components of $$\mathcal R$$ are homogeneous spaces. Then we study the metric structure of $$\mathcal R$$ by endowing it first with the uniform quotient metric, which is a Finsler metric, and we establish minimality results for the geodesics. These are given by certain one-parameter groups of unitary operators, pushed into $$\mathcal R$$ by the natural action of the unitary group. Then we study the restricted bundle $$\mathcal R_2^+$$ given by considering only the projections in the restricted Grassmannian, locally modeled by Hilbert–Schmidt operators. Therefore we endow $$\mathcal R_2^+$$ with a natural Riemannian metric that can be obtained by declaring that the action of the group is a Riemannian submersion. We study the Levi–Civita connection of this metric and establish a Hopf–Rinow theorem for $$\mathcal R_2^+$$ , again obtaining a characterization of the geodesics as the image of certain one-parameter groups with special speeds.