IRREDUCIBLE FAMILIES OF COMPLEX MATRICES CONTAINING A RANK-ONE MATRIX

Abstract

We show that an irreducible family ${\mathcal{S}}$ of complex $n\times n$ matrices satisfies Paz’s conjecture if it contains a rank-one matrix. We next investigate properties of families of rank-one matrices. If ${\mathcal{R}}$ is a linearly independent, irreducible family of rank-one matrices then (i) ${\mathcal{R}}$ has length at most $n$, (ii) if all pairwise products are nonzero, ${\mathcal{R}}$ has length 1 or 2, (iii) if ${\mathcal{R}}$ consists of elementary matrices, its minimum spanning length $M$ is the smallest integer $M$ such that every elementary matrix belongs to the set of words in ${\mathcal{R}}$ of length at most $M$. Finally, for any integer $k$ dividing $n-1$, there is an irreducible family of elementary matrices with length $k+1$.