Numerically stable deflation of hessenberg and symmetric tridiagonal matrices

While numerically stable techniques have been available for deflating a fulln byn matrix, no satisfactory finite technique has been known which preserves Hessenberg form. We describe a new algorithm which explicitly deflates a Hessenberg matrix in floating point arithmetic by means of a sequence of plane rotations. When applied to a symmetric tridiagonal matrix, the deflated matrix is again symmetric tridiagonal. Repeated deflation can be used to find an orthogonal set of eigenvectors associated with any selection of eigenvalues of a symmetric tridiagonal matrix.