An atlas for tridiagonal isospectral manifolds (Q927785)

The paper focuses on tridiagonal isospectral manifolds. The authors introduce bidiagonal coordinates, charts defined on open domains forming an explicit atlas for the compact manifold of real symmetric tridiagonal matrices. The first section is an introduction concerning the bidiagonal coordinates, which give rise to a chart of the atlas, and the construction of the chart. The second section begins with some classical facts about tridiagonal matrices. It also contains some basic facts about Jacobi matrices and norming constants, presented using the concept of \(LU\)-positivity so as to prepare to the case of bidiagonal coordinates. The authors collect some geometric properties of the isospectral manifold of real symmetric tridiagonal matrices. The third section describes the domains of open dense subsets of the compact manifold of real symmetric tridiagonal matrices, indexed by permutations \(\pi\in S_n\) both in terms of \(LU\)-positivity and based on a cell decomposition of the compact manifold of real symmetric tridiagonal matrices. The authors then construct the charts and their inverses. In the last two sections they apply bidiagonal coordinates to the study of the dynamics acting on Jacobi matrices: QR steps and Toda flows. Algorithms to compute eigenvalues of Jacobi matrices which are related to the \(QR\) factorization, as well as the flows in the Toda hierarchy, admit a very simple description in bidiagonal coordinates, from which limits at infinity are immediate. The authors conclude the paper with the computation of the wave and scattering maps of the standard Toda flow, a physical system consisting of \(n\) particles on the line under the influence of a special Hamiltonian.