The Soft Torus II: A Variational Analysis of Commutator Norms

The field of C*-algebras over the interval [0,2] for which the fibers are the Soft Tori is shown to be continuous. This result is applied to show that any pair of non-commuting unitary operators can be perturbed (in a weak sense) in such a way to decrease the commutator norm. Perturbations in norm are also considered and a characterization is given for pairs of unitary operators which are local minimum points for the commutator norm in the finite dimensional case.