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Carlo Beenakker
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There is an observation on the eigenvalues of the sum of a kind of special Hermitian matrices. How to prove it?

Suppose $A$ and $B$ belong to a kind of special hermitian matrices, which have the following properties:

  1. $A$ and $B$ contain only one negative eigenvalue.
  2. the negative eigenvalue and the second-largest positive eigenvalue are opposite to each other.
  3. $\operatorname{trace}(A) = \operatorname{trace}(B)= 1$.

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?