Zero-preserving iso-spectral flows based on parallel sums

Driessel [K.R. Driessel, Computing canonical forms using flows, Linear Algebra Appl 379 (2004) 353–379] introduced the notion of quasi-projection onto the range of a linear transformation from one inner product space into another inner product space. Here we introduce the notion of quasi-projection onto the intersection of the ranges of two linear transformations from two inner product spaces into a third inner product space. As an application, we design a new family of iso-spectral flows on the space of symmetric matrices that preserves zero patterns. We discuss the equilibrium points of these flows. We conjecture that these flows generically converge to diagonal matrices. We perform some numerical experiments with these flows which support this conjecture. We also compare our zero-preserving flows with the Toda flow.