Computing the square roots of matrices with central symmetry

For computing square roots of a nonsingular matrix A, which are functions of A, two well known fast and stable algorithms, which are based on the Schur decomposition of A, were proposed by Bj¨ork and Hammarling [3], for square roots of general complex matrices, and by Higham [10], for real square roots of real matrices. In this paper we further consider (the computation of) the square roots of matrices with central symmetry. We first investigate the structure of the square roots of these matrices and then develop several algorithms for computing the square roots. We show that our algorithms ensure significant savings in computational costs as compared to the use of standard algorithms for arbitrary matrices.Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (FCT

Structure-preserving Schur methods for computing square roots of real skew-Hamiltonian matrices

Our contribution is two-folded. First, starting from the known fact that every real skew-Hamiltonian matrix has a real Hamiltonian square root, we give a complete characterization of the square roots of a real skew-Hamiltonian matrix W. Second, we propose a structure exploiting method for computing square roots of W. Compared to the standard real Schur method, which ignores the structure, our method requires significantly less arithmetic.Comment: 27 pages; Conference "Directions in Matrix Theory 2011", July 2011, University of Coimbra, Portuga