On the geometric analysis of a quartic–quadratic optimization problem under a spherical constraint

Abstract

This paper considers the problem of solving a special quartic–quadratic optimization problem with a single sphere constraint, namely, finding a global and local minimizer of \(\frac{1}{2}\mathbf {z}^{*}A\mathbf {z}+\frac{\beta }{2}\sum _{k=1}^{n}|z_{k}|^{4}\) such that \(\Vert \mathbf {z}\Vert _{2}=1\). This problem spans multiple domains including quantum mechanics and chemistry sciences and we investigate the geometric properties of this optimization problem. Fourth-order optimality conditions are derived for characterizing local and global minima. When the matrix in the quadratic term is diagonal, the problem has no spurious local minima and global solutions can be represented explicitly and calculated in \(O(n\log {n})\) operations. When A is a rank one matrix, the global minima of the problem are unique under certain phase shift schemes. The strict-saddle property, which can imply polynomial time convergence of second-order-type algorithms, is established when the coefficient \(\beta \) of the quartic term is either at least \(O(n^{3/2})\) or not larger than O(1). Finally, the Kurdyka–Łojasiewicz exponent of quartic–quadratic problem is estimated and it is shown that the largest exponent is at least 1/4 for a broad class of stationary points.