Hermitian adjoint
An orthogonal matrix is necessarily invertible (with inverse ), unitary (), where is the Hermitian adjoint (conjugate transpose) of , and therefore normal () over the real numbers. The determinant of any orthogonal matrix is either +1 or −1. As a linear transformation, an orthogonal matrix preserves the inner product of vectors, and therefore acts as an isometry of Euclidean space, such as a rotation, reflection or rotoreflection. In other words, it is a unitary transformation.