On the spectral structure of Jordan-Kronecker products of symmetric and skew-symmetric matrices (Q2226438)

The paper answers some conjectures about the interlacing properties of the eigenvalues of a particular symmetric matrix obtained as the sum of two Kronecker products \(C = A\otimes B + B\otimes A\), where \(A,B\) are both either symmetric or skew-symmetric. Beforehand, given a symmetric involutory matrix \(P\), it is shown that there exists a basis of eigenvectors of \(C = A\otimes B + P(A\otimes B)P\) that is also a basis of eigenvector for \(P\). The eigenvalues can thus be split in two classes, even and odd, according to whether the corresponding eigenvector satisfies \(Pv = v\) or \(Pv = -v\). The interlacing property between even and odd eigenvalues is thus discussed in the case \(P(A\otimes B)P = B\otimes A\), and it is shown that it does hold when the rank of \(A\) or \(B\) is less than \(3\), or their dimension is less than \(4\), whereas one can find explicit counterexamples under different rank/dimension assumptions.