The structured distance to singularity of a symmetric tridiagonal Toeplitz matrix

Abstract

This paper is concerned with the distance of a symmetric tridiagonal Toeplitz matrix $T$ to the variety of similarly structured singular matrices, and with determining the closest matrix to $T$ in this variety. Explicit formulas are presented, that exploit the analysis of the sensitivity of the spectrum of $T$ with respect to structure-preserving perturbations of its entries.