Put . The trigonometric identities give . Expanding cosine at zero givesThe linear and cubic terms vanish, so these are the first two nonzero Taylor series terms.
The characteristic polynomial is . Solving each eigenvalue equation gives the eigenvalues and eigenvectorsFor unit-length representatives divide each displayed direction by . The two eigendirections are orthogonal, consistently with the matrix being a symmetric matrix.
The gradient is , with value at the point. Normalize the direction to a unit vector: . The directional derivative is therefore
Multiply numerator and denominator by the complex conjugate of the denominator:Thus the real part and imaginary part are .
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