Multiplicities of eigenvalues of tensors

Abstract

We study in this article multiplicities of eigenvalues of tensors. There are two natural multiplicities associated to an eigenvalue $\lambda$ of a tensor: algebraic multiplicity $\operatorname{am}(\lambda)$ and geometric multiplicity $\operatorname{gm}(\lambda)$. The former is the multiplicity of the eigenvalue as a root of the characteristic polynomial, and the latter is the dimension of the eigenvariety (i.e., the set of eigenvectors) corresponding to the eigenvalue. We show that the algebraic multiplicity could change along the orbit of tensors by the orthogonal linear group action, while the geometric multiplicity of the zero eigenvalue is invariant under this action, which is the main difficulty to study their relationships. However, we show that for a generic tensor, every eigenvalue has a unique (up to scaling) eigenvector, and both the algebraic multiplicity and geometric multiplicity are one. In general, we suggest for an $m$-th order $n$-dimensional tensor the relationship \[ \operatorname{am}(\lambda)\geq \operatorname{gm}(\lambda)(m-1)^{\operatorname{gm}(\lambda)-1}. \] We show that it is true for serveral cases, especially when the eigenvariety contains a linear subspace of dimension $\operatorname{gm}(\lambda)$ in coordinate form. As both multiplicities are invariants under the orthogonal linear group action in the matrix counterpart, this generalizes the classical result for a matrix: the algebraic mutliplicity is not smaller than the geometric multiplicity.