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Let
be a Lie group with Lie algebra
. As is well known, the exponential map
is a local homeomorphism near the identity. As such, the group law on
can be locally pulled back to an operation
defined on a neighbourhood
of the identity in
, defined as

where
is the local inverse of the exponential map. One can view
as the group law expressed in local exponential coordinates around the origin.
An asymptotic expansion for
is provided by the Baker-Campbell-Hausdorff (BCH) formula
![\displaystyle x*y = x+y+ \frac{1}{2} [x,y] + \frac{1}{12}[x,[x,y]] - \frac{1}{12}[y,[x,y]] + \ldots \displaystyle x*y = x+y+ \frac{1}{2} [x,y] + \frac{1}{12}[x,[x,y]] - \frac{1}{12}[y,[x,y]] + \ldots](http://s0.wp.com/latex.php?latex=%5Cdisplaystyle++x%2Ay+%3D+x%2By%2B+%5Cfrac%7B1%7D%7B2%7D+%5Bx%2Cy%5D+%2B+%5Cfrac%7B1%7D%7B12%7D%5Bx%2C%5Bx%2Cy%5D%5D+-+%5Cfrac%7B1%7D%7B12%7D%5By%2C%5Bx%2Cy%5D%5D+%2B+%5Cldots&bg=ffffff&fg=000000&s=0)
for all sufficiently small
, where
is the Lie bracket. More explicitly, one has the Baker-Campbell-Hausdorff-Dynkin formula 
for all sufficiently small
, where
,
is the adjoint representation
, and
is the function 
which is real analytic near
and can thus be applied to linear operators sufficiently close to the identity. One corollary of this is that the multiplication operation
is real analytic in local coordinates, and so every smooth Lie group is in fact a real analytic Lie group.
It turns out that one does not need the full force of the smoothness hypothesis to obtain these conclusions. It is, for instance, a classical result that
regularity of the group operations is already enough to obtain the Baker-Campbell-Hausdorff formula. Actually, it turns out that we can weaken this a bit, and show that even
regularity (i.e. that the group operations are continuously differentiable, and the derivatives are locally Lipschitz) is enough to make the classical derivation of the Baker-Campbell-Hausdorff formula work. More precisely, we have
Theorem 1 (
Baker-Campbell-Hausdorff formula) Let
be a finite-dimensional vector space, and suppose one has a continuous operation
defined on a neighbourhood
around the origin, which obeys the following three axioms:
Then
is real analytic (and in particular, smooth) near the origin. (In particular,
gives a neighbourhood of the origin the structure of a local Lie group.)
Indeed, we will recover the Baker-Campbell-Hausdorff-Dynkin formula (after defining
appropriately) in this setting; see below the fold.
The reason that we call this a
Baker-Campbell-Hausdorff formula is that if the group operation
has
regularity, and has
as an identity element, then Taylor expansion already gives (2), and in exponential coordinates (which, as it turns out, can be defined without much difficulty in the
category) one automatically has (3).
We will record the proof of Theorem 1 below the fold; it largely follows the classical derivation of the BCH formula, but due to the low regularity one will rely on tools such as telescoping series and Riemann sums rather than on the fundamental theorem of calculus. As an application of this theorem, we can give an alternate derivation of one of the components of the solution to Hilbert’s fifth problem, namely the construction of a Lie group structure from a Gleason metric, which was covered in the previous post; we discuss this at the end of this article. With this approach, one can avoid any appeal to von Neumann’s theorem and Cartan’s theorem (discussed in this post), or the Kuranishi-Gleason extension theorem (discussed in this post).
— 1. Proof of Baker-Campbell-Hausdorff formula — We begin with some simple bounds of Lipschitz and
type on the group law
.
Lemma 2 (Lipschitz bounds) If
are sufficiently close to the origin, then 
and 
and 
and similarly 
Proof: We begin with the first estimate. If
, then
is small, and (on multiplying by
) we have
. By (2) we have

and thus 
As
is small, we may invert the
factor to obtain (4). The proof of (5) is similar.
Now we prove (6). Write
. From (4) or (5) we have
. Since
, we have
, so by (2)
, and the claim follows. The proof of (7) is similar. 
Lemma 3 (Adjoint representation) For all
sufficiently close to the origin, there exists a linear transformation
such that
for all
sufficiently close to the origin.
Proof: Fix
. The map
is continuous near the origin, so it will suffice to establish additivity, in the sense that

for
sufficiently close to the origin.
Let
be a large natural number. Then from (3) we have

where
is the product of
copies of
. Conjugating this by
, we see that 

But from (2) we have 
and thus (by Lemma 2) 
But if we split
as the product of
and
and use (2), we have 
Putting all this together we see that 

sending
we obtain the claim. 
From (2) we see that

for
sufficiently small. Also from the associativity property we see that 
for all
sufficiently small. Combining these two properties (and using (4)) we conclude in particular that 
for
sufficiently small. Thus we see that
is a continuous linear representation. In particular,
is a continuous homomorphism into a linear group, and so we have the Hadamard lemma 
where
is the linear transformation 
From (8), (9), (2) we see that 
for
sufficiently small, and so by the product rule we have 
Also we clearly have
for
small. Thus we see that
is linear in
, and so we have ![\displaystyle \hbox{ad}_x y = [x,y] \displaystyle \hbox{ad}_x y = [x,y]](http://s0.wp.com/latex.php?latex=%5Cdisplaystyle++%5Chbox%7Bad%7D_x+y+%3D+%5Bx%2Cy%5D&bg=ffffff&fg=000000&s=0)
for some bilinear form
.
One can show that this bilinear form in fact defines a Lie bracket, but for now, all we need is that it is manifestly real analytic (since all bilinear forms are polynomial and thus analytic), thus
and
depend analytically on
.
We now give an important approximation to
in the case when
is small:
Lemma 4 For
sufficiently small, we have 
where 
Proof: If we write
, then
(by (2)) and

We will shortly establish the approximation 
inverting 
we obtain the claim.
It remains to verify (10). Let
be a large natural number. We can expand the left-hand side of (10) as a telescoping series 
Using (3), the first summand can be expanded as

From (4) one has
, so by (6), (7) we can write the preceding expression as 
which by definition of
can be rewritten as 
From (4) one has 
while from (9) one has
, hence from (2) we can rewrite (12) as 
Inserting this back into (11), we can thus write the left-hand side of (10) as 
Writing
, and then letting
, we conclude (from the convergence of the Riemann sum to the Riemann integral) that 
and the claim follows. 
We can then integrate this to obtain an exact formula for
:
Corollary 5 (Baker-Campbell-Hausdorff-Dynkin formula) For
sufficiently small, one has 
The right-hand side is clearly real analytic in
and
, and Lemma 1 follows.
Proof: Let
be a large natural number. We can express
as the telescoping sum

From (3) followed by Lemma 4 and (8), one has 

We conclude that 
Sending
, so that the Riemann sum converges to a Riemann integral, we obtain the claim. 
Remark 1 It seems likely that one can relax the
type condition (2) in the above arguments to the weaker
conditions 
and 
where
is bounded by
for some function
that goes to zero at zero, and similarly for
, as the effect of this is to replace various
errors with errors
that still go to zero as
. However,
type regularity is what is provided to us by Gleason metrics, so this type of regularity suffices for applications related to Hilbert’s fifth problem.
— 2. Building a Lie group from a Gleason metric — We can now give a slightly alternate derivation of Theorem 7 from the previous post, which asserted that every locally compact group with a Gleason metric was isomorphic to a Lie group. As in those notes, one begins by constructing the space
of one-parameter subgroups, demonstrating that it is isomorphic to a finite-dimensional vector space
, constructing the exponential map
, and then showing that this map is locally a homeomorphism. Thus we can identify a neighbourhood of the identity in
with a neighbourhood of the origin in
, thus giving a locally defined multiplication operation
in
. By construction, this map is continuous and associative, and obeys the homogeneity (3) by the definition of the exponential map. Now we verify the
estimate (2). From Lemma 8 in the previous post, one can verify that the exponential map is bilipschitz near the origin, and the claim is now to show that

for
sufficiently close to the identity in
. By definition of
, it suffices to show that 
for all
; but this follows from Lemma 8 of the previous post (and the observation, from the escape property, that
and
).
Applying Theorem 1, we now see that
is smooth, and so the group operations are smooth near the origin. Also, for any
, conjugation by
is an (local) outer automorphism of a neighbourhood of the identity, hence also an automorphism of
. Since linear maps are automatically smooth, we conclude that conjugation by
is smooth near the origin in exponential coordinates. From this, we can transport the smooth structure from a neighbourhood of the origin to the rest of
(using either left or right translations), and obtain a Lie group structure as required.