Tournament matrices with extremal spectral properties (Q1316183)

For a tournament matrix \(M\) of order \(n\), the authors define its walk space \(W_ M\) to be \(\text{Span} \{M^ j\mathbf{1}:j=0,\dots,n-1\}\) where \textbf{1} is the all ones vector. The authors show that the dimension of \(W_ M\) equals the number of eigenvalues of \(M\) whose real parts are greater than \(-{1 \over 2}\). They then focus on tournament matrices whose walk spaces have particularly simple structure, and characterize them in terms of their spectra. They also characterize the tournament matrices \(M\) such that \(J_ n-2M\) is a skew-Hadamard matrix. Throughout, they illustrate their results with examples. In Section 2 the authors investigate basic properties of the walk space and the walk polynomial of tournament matrices. In Section 3 the authors study tournament matrices whose walk spaces have simple structure. They begin by discussing how tournament matrices with walk spaces of dimension 2 arise in the study of the relationship between the score vector and the Perron vector of tournament matrices.