On the pseudo-manifold of quantum states

Abstract There are various statements in the physics literature about the stratification of quantum states, for example into orbits of a unitary group, and about generalized differentiable structures on it. Our aim is to clarify and make precise some of these statements. For A an arbitrary finite-dimensional C*-algebra and U ( A ) the group of unitary elements of A, we observe that the partition of the state space S ( A ) into U ( A ) orbits is not a decomposition and that the decomposition into orbit types is not a stratification (its pieces are not manifolds without boundary), while there is a natural Whitney stratification into matrices of fixed rank. For the latter, when A is a full matrix algebra, we give an explicit description of the pseudo-manifold structure (the conical neighborhood around any point). We then make some comments about the infinite-dimensional case.