Solution

ID: past-exam-of-the-mathematics-course-of-the-year-2-of-the-natural-sciences-course-of-the-university-of-cambridge/2007/paper-1/5/solution

Use the complex inner product , conjugate-linear in its first argument. For , put . Positivity gives
Hence the Cauchy-Schwarz inequality is . If it is immediate; equality holds precisely when the two vectors are linearly dependent.
For a unitary matrix, , so . If with a nonzero eigenvector, this implies . Thus every eigenvalue satisfies
For the one-parameter family, expand unitarity to first order: , so . Thus is a skew-Hermitian matrix, an element of the unitary Lie algebra. If , then , whereas complex conjugation gives . Consequently , proving that every eigenvalue of is purely imaginary, with zero permitted.

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