Weak extended core inverse (Q6964054)

It is well known that, given \(A \in \mathbb{C}^{m \times n}\), there exists a unique \(X \in \mathbb{C}^{n \times m}\) such that \(AXA=A, XAX=X\) and the matrices \(AX, XA\) are Hermitian. Such a unique matrix is denoted by \(A^{\dag}\) and is known as the Moore-Penrose inverse of \(A\). In this work, given matrices \(A \in \mathbb{C}^{m \times n}, C \in \mathbb{C}^{n \times m}\) the authors show that there exists a unique matrix \(Y \in \mathbb{C}^{n \times m}\) satisfying the first three equations as above and also the condition that \(Y A = A^{\dag} A +(I- A^{\dag}A)CA.\) This latter condition reduces to the fourth condition above, when \(C = A^{\dag}.\) The idea proposed in this work, in which \N\(Y\) is referred to as the weak extended core inverse of \(A\), provides a natural generalization of the extended core (EC) inverse. The authors derive various properties and representations of the weak EC inverse. Applications to systems of linear equations are presented, where certain optimality properties of the solutions are obtained.