A note on harmonic Ritz values and their reciprocals

This note summarizes an investigation of harmonic Ritz values to approximate the interior eigenvalues of a real symmetric matrix A while avoiding the explicit use of the inverse A^?1. We consider a bounded functional ψ that yields the reciprocals of the harmonic Ritz values of a symmetric matrix A. The crucial observation is that with an appropriate residual s, many results from Rayleigh quotient and Rayleigh–Ritz theory naturally extend. The same is true for the generalization to matrix pencils (A, B) when B is symmetric positive definite. These observations have an application in the computation of eigenvalues in the interior of the spectrum of a large sparse matrix. The minimum and maximum of ψ correspond to the eigenpairs just to the left and right of zero (or a chosen shift). As a spectral transformation, this distinguishes ψ from the original harmonic approach where an interior eigenvalue remains at the interior of the transformed spectrum. As a consequence, ψ is a very attractive vehicle for a matrix‐free, optimization‐based eigensolver. Instead of computing the smallest/largest eigenvalues by minimizing/maximizing the Rayleigh quotient, one can compute interior eigenvalues as the minimum/maximum of ψ. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.