Palindromic companion forms for matrix polynomials of odd degree (Q654764)

Consider an \(n\times n\) matrix polynomial with degree \(k\geq 2\) over an arbitrary field \(\mathbb{F}\). Then this matrix polynomial \(P(\lambda)\) is said to be palindromic if \(\text{rev\,}P(\lambda)= P(\lambda)\), where \(\text{rev\,}P(\lambda)^T:= \lambda^k P(1/\lambda)\) denotes the reversal polynomial of \(P(\lambda)\). For polynomials over the particular field \(\mathbb{F}=\mathbb{C}\), one can also consider \(P(\lambda)\) that are *-palindromic, i.e. polynomials that satisfy \(\text{rev\,}P(\lambda)= P(\lambda)^*\), where * denotes the conjugate transpose. In this paper, the authors observe that everything that they do here for \(T\)-palindromic polynomials works equally well for *-palindromic polynomials and so they will just refer to ``palindromic'' polynomials for the sake of simplicity. Palindromic polynomials arise in a number of application areas. The standard way to solve polynomial eigenvalue problems \(P(\lambda)x= 0\) is to convert the matrix polynomial \(P(\lambda)\) into a matrix pencil that preserves its spectral information -- a process known as linearization, when \(P(\lambda)\) is palindromic, the eigenvalues, elementary divisors, and minimal indices of \(P(\lambda)\) have certain symmetries that can be lost when using the classical first and second Frobenius companion linearizations for numerical computations, since these linearizations do not preserve the palindromic structure. Recently new families of pencils have been introduced, with particular attention to the preservation of palindromic structure. In this paper, the authors present a family of linearizations for odd degree polynomials \(P(\lambda)\) which are palindromic whenever \(P(\lambda)\) is, and which are valid for all palindromic polynomials of odd degree. The authors illustrate their construction with several examples. In addition, they establish a simple way to recover the minimal indices of the polynomial from those of the linearizations in the new family.