Solution

ID: past-exam-of-the-mathematics-course-of-the-year-2-of-the-natural-sciences-course-of-the-university-of-cambridge/2022/paper-1/6/a/solution

A skew-Hermitian matrix satisfies , where denotes the conjugate transpose. If with , then
Since , this gives .
A unitary matrix satisfies . It preserves the Hermitian inner product and norm. Thus if ,
and therefore . Zero is allowed among the purely imaginary eigenvalues in the first statement, but not among the unitary eigenvalues.

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