Is there a small skew Cayley transform with zero diagonal? (Q2502882): Difference between revisions

Let \(H\) be an Hermitian matrix (i.e. \(H^H = H\)) whose eigenvalues are ordered monotonically and put into a real column vector \(v\) whose corresponding eigenvectors can then be chosen to constitute the columns of some unitary matrix \(Q\) (\(Q^H = Q^{-1}\)) satisfying the equation \(H \cdot Q = Q \cdot \text{ Diag}(v)\). Replacing the matrix \(Q\) by \(Q \cdot \Omega\), whose columns are also eigenvalues, leaves the above equation still satisfied. Then it is proved that at least one matrix \(Q \cdot \Omega\) has a skew-Hermitian Cayley transform \(S := (I + Q \cdot \Omega)^{-1}\cdot (I - Q \cdot \Omega)\), where \(I\) stands for the identity matrix, with zeros on its diagonal and no element bigger than \(1\) in magnitude. For every integer \(n > 1\) examples exist for which the number of \(\Omega\) is infinite in the general complex case and \(2^{n-1}\) in the restricted real case. All these \(\Omega\) provide skew-Cayley transforms whose diagonal elements are zeros and whose every off-diagonal element has magnitude \(1\). Perturbing a complex Hermitian matrix \(H\) changes its unitary matrix \(Q\) of eigenvectors to a perturbed unitary matrix \(Q \cdot (I + S)^{-1} \cdot (I - S)\) in which the skew Hermitian matrix \(S = -S^H\) can always be chosen to be small (no element bigger than \(1\) in magnitude) and to have zeros on its diagonal. It is not yet known when \(H\) is real symmetric and \(Q\) is real orthogonal and \(S\) is restricted to be real-skew symmetric, whether \(S\) can always be chosen to have no element bigger in magnitude than \(1\).