Bounds for the extremal eigenvalues of a class of symmetric tridiagonal matrices with applications

We consider a class of symmetric tridiagonal matrices which may be viewed as perturbations of Toeplitz matrices. The Toeplitz structure is destroyed since two elements on each off-diagonal are perturbed. Based on a careful analysis, we derive sharp bounds for the extremal eigenvalues of this class of matrices in terms of the original data of the given matrix. In this way, we also obtain a lower bound for the smallest singular value of certain matrices. Some numerical results indicate that our bounds are extremely good.