Spectrally arbitrary ray patterns

An n×n ray pattern A is said to be spectrally arbitrary if for every monic nth degree polynomial f(x) with coefficients from C, there is a matrix in the pattern class of A such that its characteristic polynomial is f(x). In this article the authors extend the nilpotent-Jacobi method for sign patterns to ray patterns, establishing a means to show that an irreducible ray pattern and all its superpatterns are spectrally arbitrary. They use this method to establish that a particular family of n×n irreducible ray patterns with exactly 3n nonzeros is spectrally arbitrary. They then show that every n×n irreducible, spectrally arbitrary ray pattern has at least 3n-1 nonzeros.