In 2020, Cossu and Zanardo raised a problem on the idempotent factorization of singular matrices in the form ( p z z ¯ ‖ z ‖ / p ) , where p is a prime integer which is irreducible but not prime in the ring of integers O K , with K a real quadratic number field, and z ∈ O K is such that 〈 p , z 〉 is a non-principal ideal. In this paper, we provide some classes of matrices that factor in a prescribed way and some other classes that do not. We further show that there are matrices in the above form that cannot be written as a product of two idempotent matrices.
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