UC San Diego

This paper extends previous work on approximation of loops to the case of special orthogonal groups SO(N), N≥3. We prove that the best approximation of an SO(N) loop Q(t) belonging to a Hölder class Lip α , α>1, by a polynomial SO(N) loop of degree ≤n is of order $\mathcal{O}(n^{-\alpha+\epsilon})$ for n≥k, where k=k(Q) is determined by topological properties of the loop and ε>0 is arbitrarily small. The convergence rate is therefore ε-close to the optimal achievable rate of approximation. The construction of polynomial loops involves higher-order splitting methods for the matrix exponential. A novelty in this work is the factorization technique for SO(N) loops which incorporates the loops’ topological aspects.