QR algorithm repeating eigenvalues

Question

Can QR algorithm find repeat eigenvalues (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QR_algorithm) ? I.e. Does it support the case when not all N eigen value for real matrix N x N are distinct?

How extend QR algorithm to support finding complex eigenvalues?

Answer 1

In principle yes. It will work if the eigenvalues are really all eigenvalues, i.e., the algebraic and geometric multiplicity are the same.

If the multiple eigenvalue occurs in an Jordan-block of size s, then the unavoidable floating point error during the iteration will almost surely result in a star-shaped perturbation into an eigenvalue cluster with relative error of size mu^(1/s) where mu is the machine constant of the floating point data type.

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The reason this happens is that on the irreducible invariant subspace corresponding to a Jordan block of size s the characteristic polynomial of the reduction of the linear operator to this subspace has is (λ-λ[j])^s. During the computation this gets perturbed to (λ-λ[j])^s+μq(λ) which in first approximation has roots close to λ[j]+μ^(1/s)*z[k], where z[k] denotes the s roots of 0=z^s+q(λ[k]). What the perturbation function q is is quite random, accumulated floating point truncation errors, and depends on details of the method.