Tight bounds on the spectral radius of asymmetric nonnegative matrices

Abstract

For an arbitrary asymmetric nonnegative n × n matrix A we identify a pair of symmetric matrices whose largest eigenvalues bound the spectral radius of A. Furthermore, we show that these bounding matrices are best possible by characterizing matrices A which attain equality with either the upper or the lower bounding matrix. The lower bound may be extended to some matrices with negative entries provided they have no negative cycles.