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Ludwig
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A "diagonal plus skew-symmetric" matrix decomposition

Let $A\in\mathbb{R}^{n\times n}$ be a diagonalizable matrix with real and strictly positive eigenvalues (note that $A$ is not required to be symmetric).

My questions:

  1. Does there exists an orthogonal matrix $T\in\mathbb{R}^{n\times n}$ and a symmetric positive definite matrix $P\in\mathbb{R}^{n\times n}$ such that $$ TAPT^\top = D+S, $$ where $D\in\mathbb{R}^{n\times n}$ is a diagonal matrix with positive diagonal entries and $S\in\mathbb{R}^{n\times n}$ is a skew-symmetric matrix?
  2. In case the answer to my previous question is in the affirmative, is it possible to find a matrix pair $(T,P)$ such that $\mathrm{trace}(D)=\frac{1}{2\,\mathrm{trace}(A)}$?
Ludwig
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