Abstract:
This note mainly aims to improve the inequality, proposed by Böttcher and Wenzel, giving the upper bound of the Frobenius norm of the commutator of two particular matrices in $\mathbb R^{n\times n}$. We first propose a new upper bound on basis of the Böttcher and Wenzel's inequality. Motivated by the method used, the inequality $\|\boldsymbol{XY}-\boldsymbol{YX}\|_F^2\le2\|\boldsymbol X\|_F^2\|\boldsymbol Y\|_F^2$ is finally improved into
$$
\|\boldsymbol{XY}-\boldsymbol{YX}\|_F^2\le2\|\boldsymbol X\|_F^2\|\boldsymbol Y\|_F^2-2[\operatorname{tr}(\boldsymbol X^T\boldsymbol Y)]^2.
$$
In addition, a further improvement is made.
Keywords:commutator, Frobenius norm, Böttcher and Wenzel's conjecture, random matrix.