Applications of geometric means on symmetric cones

Let V be a Euclidean Jordan algebra, and let be the corresponding symmetric cone. The geometric mean of two elements a and b in is defined as a unique solution, which belongs to of the quadratic equation where P is the quadratic representation of V. In this paper, we show that for any a in the sequence of iterate of the function defined by converges to a. As applications, we obtain that the geometric mean of can be represented as a limit of successive iteration of arithmetic means and harmonic means, and we derive the L?wner-Heinz inequality on the symmetric cone Furthermore, we obtain a formula which leads a Golden-Thompson type inequality for the spectral norm on V. Received October 5, 1999 / Revised March 6, 2000 / Published online October 30, 2000