The Jordan-Chevalley decomposition and Jordan canonical form of a quaternionic linear operator

Abstract

We introduce some basic notions and results for quaternionic linear operators analogous to those for complex linear operators. Our main result is to prove the additive and multiplicative Jordan-Chevalley decompositions for quaternionic linear operators, which are related by the exponential map. We also give a new proof of the theorem of Jordan canonical form for quaternionic linear operators, which is intrinsic and takes less computations than the known proofs for square quaternionic matrices.