On Hastings' approach to Lin's Theorem for Almost Commuting Matrices

Abstract

Lin's theorem states that for all $\epsilon > 0$, there is a $\delta > 0$ such that for all $n \geq 1$ if self-adjoint contractions $A,B \in M_n(\mathbb{C})$ satisfy $\|[A,B]\|< \delta$ then there are self-adjoint contractions $A',B' \in M_n(\mathbb{C})$ with $[A',B']=0$ and $\|A-A'\|,\|B-B'\|<\epsilon$. We present fully explained and corrected details of the approach in arXiv:0808.2474, which was the first version of Lin's theorem to provide asymptotic estimates. We also apply this method to the case where $B$ is a normal matrix with spectrum lying in some nice 1-dimensional subset of $\mathbb{C}$.