An extension of Jensen's operator inequality and its application to Young inequality
Hamid Reza Moradi, Shigeru Furuichi, Flavia-Corina Mitroi-Symeonidis, and Razieh Naseri

TL;DR
This paper extends Jensen's operator inequality to convexifiable functions, leading to new refinements and reverses of Young's inequality, with potential applications in operator theory.
Contribution
It introduces a generalized Jensen's operator inequality for convexifiable functions, broadening the scope of classical inequalities.
Findings
Derived a generalized Jensen's operator inequality for convexifiable functions.
Provided new refinements and reverses of Young's inequality.
Unified classical and new inequalities under a common framework.
Abstract
Jensen's operator inequality for convexifiable functions is obtained. This result contains classical Jensen's operator inequality as a particular case. As a consequence, a new refinement and a reverse of Young's inequality is given.
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Taxonomy
TopicsMathematical Inequalities and Applications · Functional Equations Stability Results · Mathematical functions and polynomials
An extension of Jensen’s operator inequality and its application to Young inequality
Hamid Reza Moradi, Shigeru Furuichi, Flavia-Corina Mitroi-Symeonidis and Razieh Naseri
Abstract.
Jensen’s operator inequality for convexifiable functions is obtained. This result contains classical Jensen’s operator inequality as a particular case. As a consequence, a new refinement and a reverse of Young’s inequality are given.
Key words and phrases:
Convexifiable functions, Jensen’s inequality, Young inequality, operator inequality.
2010 Mathematics Subject Classification:
Primary 47A63, 26A51. Secondary 26D15, 47A64, 46L05.
1. Introduction and Preliminaries
In this article, will denote a Hilbert space, and the term “operator” we shall mean endormorphism of . The following result that provides an operator version for the Jensen inequality is due to Mond and Pečarić [12]:
Theorem 1.1**.**
(Jensen’s operator inequality for convex functions).* Let be a self-adjoint operator with for some scalars . If is a convex function on , then*
[TABLE]
for every unit vector .
Over the years, various extensions and generalizations of (1.1) have been obtained in the literature, e.g., [6, 7, 13]. For this background we refer to any expository text such as [5].
The aim of this paper is to find an inequality which contains (1.1) as a special case. Our result also allows to obtain a refinement and a reverse for the scalar Young inequality. More precisely, it will be shown that for two non-negative numbers we have
[TABLE]
where , , and is the Kantorovich constant with .
To make the text more self-contained we give a brief overview of convexifiable functions. Given a continuous defined on the compact interval , consider a function defined by . If is a convex function on for some , then is called a convexification of and a convexifier on . A function is convexifiable if it has a convexification. It is noted in [15, Corollary 2.9] that if the continuously differentiable function has Lipschitz derivative (i.e., for any and some constant ), then is a convexifier of .
The following fact concerning convexifiable functions plays an important role in our discussion (see [15, Corollary 2.8]):
[TABLE]
The reader may consult [16] for additional information about this topic. For all other notions used in the paper, we refer the reader to the monograph [5].
2. Main Results
After the above preparation, we are ready to prove the analogue of (1.1) for non-convex functions.
Theorem 2.1**.**
(Jensen’s operator inequality for non-convex functions).* Let be a continuous convexifiable function on the interval and a convexifier of . Then*
[TABLE]
for every self-adjoint operator with and every unit vector .
Proof.
The idea of proof evolves from the approach in [17]. Let with . According to the assumption, is convex. Therefore
[TABLE]
for every unit vector . This expression is equivalent to the desired inequality (2.1). ∎
A few remarks concerning Theorem 2.1 are in order.
Remark 2.1**.**
- (a)
Using the fact that for a convex function one can choose the convexifier , one recovers the inequality (1.1).
- (b)
For continuously differentiable function with Lipschitz derivative and Lipschitz constant , we have
[TABLE]
An important special case of Theorem 2.1, which refines inequality (1.1) can be explicitly stated using the property (P).
Remark 2.2**.**
Let be a twice continuously differentiable strictly convex function and . Then
[TABLE]
for every positive operator with and every unit vector .
The inequality (2.2) is obtained in the paper [13, Theorem 3.3] (where this result was derived for the strongly convex functions) with a different technique (see also [4]).
The proof of the following corollary is adapted from the one of [5, Theorem 1.3], but we put a sketch of the proof for the reader.
Corollary 2.1**.**
Let be a continuous convexifiable function on the interval and a convexifier. Let be self-adjoint operators on with for and be such that . Then
[TABLE]
Proof.
In fact, is a unit vector in the Hilbert space . If we introduce the “diagonal” operator on
[TABLE]
then, obviously, , , , , . Hence, to complete the proof, it is enough to apply Theorem 2.1 for and . ∎
Corollary 2.1 leads us to the following result. The argument depends on an idea of [1, Corollary 1].
Corollary 2.2**.**
Let be a continuous convexifiable function on the interval and a convexifier. Let be self-adjoint operators on with for and let be positive scalars such that . Then
[TABLE]
for every unit vector .
Proof.
Suppose that is a unit vector. Putting so that and applying Corollary 2.1 we obtain the desired result (2.4). ∎
The clear advantage of our approach over the Jensen operator inequality is shown in the following example. Before proceeding we recall the following multiple operator version of Jensen’s inequality [1, Corollary 1]: Let be a convex function and be self-adjoint operators with , for some scalars . If , with , then
[TABLE]
for every with .
Example 2.1**.**
We use the same idea from [17, Illustration 1]. Let , , , , , , , and . After simple calculations (thanks to the continuous functional calculus), from (2.4) we infer that
[TABLE]
and (2.5) implies
[TABLE]
Not so surprisingly, the inequality (2.7) can break down when (i.e., (2.5) is not applicable here). However, the new upper bound in (2.6) holds.
The weighted version of [17, Theorem 3] follows from Corollary 2.2, i.e.,
[TABLE]
where and . For the case , the inequality (2.8) reduces to
[TABLE]
where . In particular
[TABLE]
It is notable that Theorem 2.1 is equivalent to the inequality (2.8). The following provides a refinement of the arithmetic-geometric mean inequality.
Proposition 2.1**.**
For each and , we have
[TABLE]
where and is the Heinz mean.
Proof.
Assume that is a twice differentiable convex function such that where . Under these conditions, it follows that
[TABLE]
for . Now taking with in the above inequalities, we deduce the desired inequality (2.11). ∎
Remark 2.3**.**
As Bhatia pointed out in [2], the Heinz means interpolate between the geometric mean and the arithmetic mean, i.e.,
[TABLE]
Of course, the first inequality in (2.11) yields an improvement of (2.12). The inequalities in (2.11) also sharpens up the following inequality which is due to Dragomir (see [3, Remark 1]):
[TABLE]
Studying about the arithmetic-geometric mean inequality, we cannot avoid mentioning its cousin, the Young inequality. The following inequalities provides a multiplicative type refinement and reverse of the Young’s inequality:
[TABLE]
where , , and with . The first one was proved by Zuo et al. [18, Corollary 3], while the second one was given by Liao et al. [9, Corollary 2.2].
Our aim in the following is to establish a refinement for the inequalities in (2.13). The crucial role for our purposes will play the following facts:
If is a convex function on the fixed closed interval , then
[TABLE]
[TABLE]
where with , , . Notice that the first inequality goes back to Pečarić et al. [10, Theorem 1, P.717], while the second one was obtained by Mitroi in [11, Corollary 3.1].
Now we come to the announced theorem. In order to simplify the notations, we put and .
Theorem 2.2**.**
Let and . Then
[TABLE]
where , , and with .
Proof.
Employing the inequality (2.14) for the twice differentiable convex function with , we have
[TABLE]
Here we set , , , , , and with (so ). Thus we deduce the first inequality in (2.16). The second inequality in (2.16) is also obtained similarly by using the inequality (2.15). ∎
Remark 2.4**.**
- (a)
Since for each , we have . Therefore the first inequality in (2.16) provides an improvement for the first inequality in (2.13).
- (b)
Since for each , we get . Therefore the second inequality in (2.16) provides an improvement for the second inequality in (2.13).
Proposition 2.2**.**
Under the same assumptions in Theorem 2.2, we have
[TABLE]
Proof.
We prove the case , then . We set It is quite easy to see that so that . For the case , (then ), we also set By direct calculation so that . Thus the statement follows. ∎
Remark 2.5**.**
Dragomir obtained a refinement and reverse of Young’s inequality in [3, Theorem 3] as:
[TABLE]
where . From the following facts (a) and (b), we claim that our inequalities are non-trivial results.
- (a)
From Proposition 2.2, our lower bound in (2.16) is tighter than the one in (2.17).
- (b)
Numerical computations show that there is no ordering between the right hand side in (2.16) and the one in the second inequality of (2.17) shown in **[3, Theorem 3]**. For example, if we take , and , then
[TABLE]
whereas it approximately equals when , and .
We give a further remark in relation to comparisons with other inequalities.
Remark 2.6**.**
The following refined Young inequality and its reverse are known
[TABLE]
where , and . The first and second inequality were given in [14, Lemma 2.1] and in [9, Theorem 2.1], respectively.
Numerical computations show that there is no ordering between our inequalities (2.16) and the above ones. Actually, if we take and (we set with in (2.16)), then
[TABLE]
while it equals approximately when and .
Similarly, when and we get
[TABLE]
while it equals approximately when and .
Obviously, in the inequality (2.13), we cannot replace by , or vice versa. In this regard, we have the following theorem. The proof is almost the same as that of Theorem 2.2 (it is enough to use the convexity of the function where ).
Theorem 2.3**.**
Let all the assumptions of Theorem 2.2 hold except that . Then
[TABLE]
We end this paper by presenting the operator inequalities based on Theorems 2.2 and 2.3, thanks to the Kubo-Ando theory [8].
Corollary 2.3**.**
Let , be two positive invertible operators and positive real numbers , , , that satisfy one of the following conditions:
- (i)
.
- (ii)
.
Then
[TABLE]
and
[TABLE]
where , and with and .
Proof.
On account of (2.16), we have
[TABLE]
for the positive operator such that . Setting .
In the first case we have , which implies that
[TABLE]
We can write (2.20) in the form
[TABLE]
Finally, multiplying both sides of the previous inequality by we get the desired result (2.19).
The proof of other cases is similar, we omit the details. ∎
Acknowledgement
The authors thank anonymous referees for giving valuable comments and suggestions to improve our manuscript. The author (S.F.) was partially supported by JSPS KAKENHI Grant Number 16K05257.
The reference list from the paper itself. Each links out to its DOI / PubMed record.
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- 2[2] Bhatia, R.: Interpolating the arithmetic-geometric mean inequality and its operator version. Linear Algebra Appl ., 413 , 355–363 (2006)
- 3[3] Dragomir, S. S.: On new refinements and reverse of Young’s operator inequality. ar Xiv:1510.01314 v 1
- 4[4] Dragomir, S. S.: Some Jensen’s type inequalities for twice differentiable functions of selfadjoint operators in Hilbert spaces. Filomat ., 23 (3) 211–222 (2009)
- 5[5] Furuta, T., Mićić Hot, J., Pečarić, J. Seo, Y.: Mond-Pečarić method in operator inequalities. Monographs in Inequalities 1, Element, Zagreb, 2005
- 6[6] Horváth, L., Khan, K. A., Pečarić, J.: Cyclic refinements of the different versions of operator Jensen’s inequality. Electron. J. Linear Algebra ., 31 (1), 125–133 (2016)
- 7[7] Kian, M.: Operator Jensen inequality for superquadratic functions. Linear Algebra Appl ., 456 , 82–87 (2014)
- 8[8] Kubo, F., Ando, T.: Means of positive linear operators. Math. Ann ., 246 (3), 205–224 (1980)
