Strong shift equivalence and shear adjacency of nonnegative square integer matrices

For two square matrices A, B of possibly different sizes with nonnegative integer entries, write A ≈₁ B if A = RS and B = SR for some two nonnegative integer matrices R,S. The transitive closure of this relation is called strong shift equivalence and is important in symbolic dynamics, where it has been shown by R.F. Williams to characterize the isomorphism of two topological Markov chains with transition matrices A and B. One invariant is the characteristic polynomial up to factors of λ. However, no procedure for deciding strong shift equivalence is known, even for 2×2 matrices A, B. In fact, for n × n matrices with n > 2, no nontrivial sufficient condition is known. This paper presents such a sufficient condition: that A and B are in the same component of a directed graph whose vertices are all n × n nonnegative integer matrices sharing a fixed characteristic polynomial and whose edges correspond to certain elementary similarities. For n > 2 this result gives confirmation of strong shift equivalences that previously could not be verified; for n = 2, previous results are strengthened and the structure of the directed graph is determined.