Uniform homeomorphisms between spheres of unitarily invariant ideals

Abstract: The classical Mazur map is a uniform homeomorphism between the unit spheres of $L_p$ spaces, and the version for noncommutative $L_p$ spaces has the same property. Odell and Schlumprecht used two types of generalized Mazur maps to prove that the unit sphere of a Banach space $X$ with an unconditional basis is uniformly homeomorphic to the unit sphere of a Hilbert space if and only if $X$ does not contain $\ell_\infty^n$'s uniformly. We prove a noncommutative version of this result, yielding uniform homeomorphisms between spheres of unitarily invariant ideals, and along the way we study noncommutative versions of the aforementioned generalized Mazur maps: one based on the $p$-convexification procedure, and one based on the minimization of quantum relative entropy. The main result provides new examples of Banach spaces whose unit spheres are uniformly homeomorphic to the unit sphere of a Hilbert space (in fact, spaces with the property (H) of Kasparov and Yu).