A bound on the scrambling index of a primitive matrix using Boolean rank

Abstract

The scrambling index of an $n\times n$ primitive matrix $A$ is the smallest positive integer $k$ such that $A^k(A^{t})^k=J$, where $A^t$ denotes the transpose of $A$ and $J$ denotes the $n\times n$ all ones matrix. For an $m\times n$ Boolean matrix $M$, its {\it Boolean rank} $b(M)$ is the smallest positive integer $b$ such that $M=AB$ for some $m \times b$ Boolean matrix $A$ and $b\times n$ Boolean matrix $B$. In this paper, we give an upper bound on the scrambling index of an $n\times n$ primitive matrix $M$ in terms of its Boolean rank $b(M)$. Furthermore we characterize all primitive matrices that achieve the upper bound.