Noncommutative Burkholder/Rosenthal inequalities II: Applications

We show norm estimates for the sum of independent random variables in noncommutative L _p -spaces for 1 < p < ∞, following our previous work. These estimates generalize the classical Rosenthal inequality in the commutative case. As applications, we derive an equivalence for the p-norm of the singular values of a random matrix with independent entries, and characterize those symmetric subspaces and unitary ideals which can be realized as subspaces of a noncommutative L _p for 2 < p < ∞. The first author is partially supported by the National Science Foundation DMS-0301116. The second author is partially supported by the Agence Nationale de Recherche 06-BLAN-0015.