Improved bounds in Weaver's ${\rm KS}_r$ conjecture for high rank positive semidefinite matrices

Abstract

Recently Marcus, Spielman and Srivastava proved Weaver's ${\rm{KS}}_r$ conjecture, which gives a positive solution to the Kadison-Singer problem. Cohen and Br\"and\'en independently extended this result to obtain the arbitrary-rank version of Weaver's ${\rm{KS}}_r$ conjecture. In this paper, we present a new bound in Weaver's ${\rm{KS}}_r$ conjecture for the arbitrary-rank case. To do that, we introduce the definition of $(k,m)$-characteristic polynomials and employ it to improve the previous estimate on the largest root of the mixed characteristic polynomials. For the rank-one case, our bound agrees with the Bownik-Casazza-Marcus-Speegle's bound when $r=2$ and with the Ravichandran-Leake's bound when $r>2$. For the higher-rank case, we sharpen the previous bounds from Cohen and from Br\"and\'en .