Laplace-Lagrange inclination matrix Created 2026-10-05 Updated 2026-10-06
For circular planetary orbits with angular momenta , the inclination matrix has positive off-diagonal entries, zero row sums, and . Positive diagonal symmetrization of a matrix with makes a symmetric matrix. Moreover,
All eigenvalues are real and nonpositive. The zero eigenvalue is a common tilt of every orbital plane; nonzero modes describe relative nodal precession.
Let and be the scalar mass matrix, which is the Hessian matrix of the scalar potential at the vacuum. Invariance under the infinitesimal Lie group action gives
Differentiate with respect to and evaluate at the vacuum expectation value . Since at a minimum,
Thus every tangent vector generated by a broken Lie algebra generator is a zero eigenvalue eigenvector of the scalar mass matrix. The unbroken generators are precisely those in the stabilizer Lie algebra and give the zero tangent vector; independent broken directions span . Hence Goldstone theorem gives
massless scalar modes at the classical level.
Power iteration Created 2026-10-05 Updated 2026-10-14
Power iteration finds a dominant eigenvalue and its eigenvector by repeatedly applying a matrix and rescaling the resulting vector. The essential idea is selective amplification: components along different eigenvectors grow at different rates, so one direction can eventually dominate. It is the computational form of the power method and is useful when applying a large sparse matrix to a vector is cheap but computing its whole spectral decomposition is expensive.
For a square matrix over the real numbers or complex numbers , choose a unit vector and repeat
Here is the Euclidean norm. If , stop before division: the current vector is an eigenvector for the zero eigenvalue, and this iteration cannot continue. Otherwise, in exact arithmetic,
Repeated normalization keeps the stored vectors at manageable size without changing their directions; it does not guarantee that an individual multiplication cannot exceed the range of floating-point arithmetic. The dominant eigenvalue means largest modulus, which need not mean largest signed real value.[ref]
Consider
Its row sums vanish, so is an eigenvector for the zero eigenvalue. Its characteristic polynomial is
with sum of principal minors of order two
The other eigenvalues are . No symmetry is required for this formula; positive diagonal symmetrization of a matrix is a sufficient condition for real roots.