Decompositions of pseudo-unitary and centro-unitary matrices (Q2405042)

\noindent Let \(\mathbf{C}^{n}\) be the pseudo-unitary space with inner product given by \(\mathcal{P}_{n}=\begin{pmatrix} &&&&1\\ &&&1&\\ &&\dots&&\\ 1&&&& \end{pmatrix}\). Here, the centro-symmetric and centro-Hermitian matrices correspond to the symmetric and Hermitian matrices in the usual case. They were studied in the years from 1970 onwards. One particular type of matrix related to the above metric has, however, not been considered so far: the matrices \(\mathcal{Q}\) with the property \(\mathcal{Q}^*\mathcal{P}_{n}\mathcal{Q}=\mathcal{P}_{n}\), which play the role of unitary matrices here and are thus called centro-unitary. In this paper, the author discusses the structure of the group of \(2n\times 2n\) centro-unitary matrices and shows that, in a certain sense, it is isomorphic to the group of \(n\times n\) pseudo-unitary matrices. The main result of this paper is an algorithm for decomposing an arbitrary \(n\times n\) pseudo-unitary matrix into a product of special matrices of the same type. In the final section, the author inverts the original isomorphism in order to derive an analogous result for decomposing centro-unitary matrices.