Almost Commuting Unitaries with Spectral Gap Are near Commuting Unitaries

Let Mn be the collection of n×n complex matrices equipped with operator norm. Suppose U, V ∈ Mn are two unitary matrices, each possessing a gap larger than ∆ in their spectrum, which satisfy ‖UV −V U‖ ≤ ǫ. Then it is shown that there are two unitary operators X and Y satisfying XY −Y X = 0 and ‖U−X‖+‖V −Y ‖ ≤ E(∆/ǫ) “ ǫ ∆2 ” 1 6 , where E(x) is a function growing slower than x 1 k for any positive integer k.