Solutions to a quadratic inverse eigenvalue problem (Q1002261)

The authors deal with the quadratic inverse eigenvalue problem (QIEP), which they state as follows: Given \(m\) (\(n<m\leq 2n\)) prescribed eigenpairs in matrix form \( (\Lambda ,X),\) where \[ \Lambda =diag\left( \lambda _{1}^{[2]},\dots,\lambda _{\ell}^{[2]},\lambda _{2\ell +1},\dots,\lambda _{m}\right) \in \mathbb{R}^{m \times m} \] with \[ \lambda _{j}\in \mathbb{R},\lambda _{j}^{[2]}=\left[ \begin{matrix} \alpha _{j} & \beta _{j} \\ -\beta _{j} & \alpha _{j} \end{matrix} \right] ,\alpha _{j},\beta _{j}\in \mathbb{R},\beta _{j}>0 \] and \[ X=\left[ \text{{x}}_{1R},\text{{x}}_{1I},\dots,\text{{x}} _{\ell R},\text{{x}}_{\ell I},\text{{x}}_{2\ell +1},\dots,\text{{x}}_{m}\right] \in \mathbb{R}^{n\times m} \] find a nontrivial quadratic matrix polynomial \(Q(\lambda )=\lambda ^{2}M+\lambda C+K\) with \(M,C,K\) being \(n\times n\) real symmetric matrices such that \[ MX\Lambda ^{2}+CX\Lambda +KX=0_{n\text{ }\times m} \] where a \(2\times 2\) block \(\left[ \begin{matrix} \alpha _{j} & \beta _{j} \\ -\beta _{j} & \alpha _{j} \end{matrix} \right] \) and the corresponding columns \(\left[ {x}_{jR},{x} _{jI}\right] \) in \(X\) represent the complex conjugate pairs of eigenvalues \( \alpha _{j}\pm i\beta _{j}\) and the corresponding eigenvectors \({x} _{jR}\pm i\, {x}_{jI}.\) As a main result, this paper characterizes the generic dimension of the solution space for the QIEP. in particular , it is proved that the generic solvability of the QIEP is characterized by the number \(m_{\ast }\equiv n+(1+ \sqrt{1+8n})/2.\) Actually it is shown that for almost all prescribed \( (\Lambda ,X),\) when \(n<m<m_{\ast },\) the QIEP has a solution \((M,C,K)\) with \( M\) nonsingular, and all the solutions to the QIEP form a subspace of dimension \(\frac{1}{2}(2n-m)(2n-m+1)+n+\frac{1}{2}(m-n)(1+n-m);\) when \( m_{\ast }\leq m\leq 2n,\) the QIEP has only solutions with \(\det (Q(\lambda ))\equiv 0,\) and all the solutions form a subspace of dimension \(\frac{1}{2} (2n-m)(2n-m+1).\)