Matrix-valued Gowers U2 quantity ($\Vert f{\Vert }_{U^2}^4={\mathbb{E}}_{x{y}^{-1}z{w}^{-1}=e}\mathrm{tr}(f(x)f(y{)}^{\ast }f(z)f(w{)}^{\ast })$)

For $f:G\to M_n(\mathbb{C})$ on a finite group, use uniform expectation over the solutions of $x{y}^{-1}z{w}^{-1}=e$ and the ordinary, unnormalized trace to define the displayed fourth-order quantity. If $T_{\rho }$ is its matrix Fourier block, this quantity equals ${\sum }_{\rho }{d}_{\rho }\mathrm{Tr}((T_{\rho }{T}_{\rho }^{\ast }{)}^2)$, so it is real and nonnegative. For a scalar function on an abelian group, it reduces to the usual fourth power of the Gowers uniformity norm of order two. The unnormalized trace means a unitary matrix-valued function can have fourth-order quantity as large as $n$.

If $\Vert f(x){\Vert }_{\mathrm{op}}\le 1$ and $\Vert f{\Vert }_{U^2}^4\ge cn>0$, select the singular values ${\lambda }_p\ge \sqrt{c/2}$ of the matrix Fourier blocks. Their weighted count $m={\sum }_p{d}_{{\rho }_p}$ lies between $cn/2$ and $2n/c$. Scaling unit right singular vectors and their corresponding unit left singular vectors by $\sqrt{d_{{\rho }_p}}$ gives matrices $U(p),V(p)$ satisfying ${\mathbb{E}}_{x}f(x)U(p){\rho }_p(x{)}^{\ast }={\lambda }_{p}V(p)$ and Hilbert-Schmidt inner product orthogonality within each chosen irreducible representation. The Schur averaging of rectangular matrices then gives ${\mathbb{E}}_x\Vert UP(x{)}^{\ast }b{\Vert }_2^2=\Vert b{\Vert }_2^2$ for the concatenated $U$ and the corresponding block diagonal matrix $P(x)$.

For $f:G\to M_n(\mathbb{C})$ and a degree-$d_{\rho }$ unitary irreducible representation, the matrix Fourier block is the operator $T_{\rho }$ on $M_{n\times d_{\rho }}(\mathbb{C})$ defined in the title. Its singular values ${\lambda }_{\rho ,j}$ satisfyPointwise operator norm at most one implies $\Vert T_{\rho }{\Vert }_{\mathrm{op}}\le 1$. These blocks are operators on a matrix space, rather than simply the entrywise scalar Fourier transform on a finite group without any reshaping.