Anticommutative property


In mathematics, anticommutativity is a specific property of some non-commutative operations. In mathematical physics, where symmetry is of central importance, these operations are mostly called antisymmetric operations, and are extended in an associative setting to cover more than two arguments. Swapping the position of two arguments of an antisymmetric operation yields a result, which is the inverse of the result with unswapped arguments. The notion inverse refers to a group structure on the operation's codomain, possibly with another operation, such as addition.
A prominent example of an anticommutative operation is the Lie bracket.

Definition

An n-ary operation is antisymmetric if swapping the order of any two arguments negates the result. For example, a binary operation "∗" is anti-commutative if for all x and y,
More formally, a map from the set of all n-tuples of elements in a set A to a group is anticommutative with respect to the group operation "+" if and only if
where is the result of permuting with the permutation and is the identity map for even permutations and maps each element of A to its inverse for odd permutations. In an associative setting it is convenient to denote this with a binary operation "∗":
This equality expresses the following concept:
Particularly important is the case. A binary operation is anticommutative if and only if
This means that is the additive inverse of the element in.
In the most frequent cases in physics, where carries already a field structure, the fact
implies that applying an anticommutative operation to any collection of operands yields zero, if any two operands are equal. That is

Properties

If the group is such that
i.e. the only element equal to its inverse is the neutral element, then for all the ordered tuples such that for at least two different index
In the case this means

Examples

Examples of anticommutative binary operations include: