Biquadratic Tensors: Eigenvalues and Structured Tensors

The covariance tensors in statistics and Riemann curvature tensor in relativity theory are both biquadratic tensors that are weakly symmetric, but not symmetric in general. Motivated by this, in this paper, we consider nonsymmetric biquadratic tensors and extend M-eigenvalues to nonsymmetric biquadratic tensors by symmetrizing these tensors. We present a Gershgorin-type theorem for biquadratic tensors, and show that (strictly) diagonally dominated biquadratic tensors are positive semi-definite (definite). We introduce Z-biquadratic tensors, M-biquadratic tensors, strong M-biquadratic tensors, B${}_0$-biquadratic tensors, and B-biquadratic tensors. We show that M-biquadratic tensors and symmetric B${}_0$-biquadratic tensors are positive semi-definite, and that strong M-biquadratic tensors and symmetric B-biquadratic tensors are positive definite. A Riemannian Limited-memory Broyden–Fletcher–Goldfarb–Shanno (LBFGS) method for computing the smallest M-eigenvalue of a general biquadratic tensor is presented. Numerical results are reported.