Suppose $A$ and $B$ belong to a kind of special hermitian matrices, which have the following properties:
- $A$ and $B$ contain only one negative eigenvalue.
- the negative eigenvalue and the second-largest positive eigenvalue are opposite to each other.
- $\operatorname{trace}(A) = \operatorname{trace}(B)= 1$.
Let $$ C=\alpha A+(1-\alpha)B,\quad \alpha \in [0,1]. $$ Then, we can find that the absolute value of the minimum eigenvalue of $C$ is always less than the second-largest positive eigenvalue of $C$ (just like an upper bound).
Can this observation be proved?