1. Introduction
Third-order tensors play an important role in physics and engineering, such as in solid crystal study [
1,
2,
3,
4] and liquid crystal study [
1,
5,
6]. We know that piezoelectric tensors are the most well-known tensor among third-order tensors and come from applications in the piezoelectric effect and converse piezoelectric effect in solid crystals from [
1,
2,
7].
Definition 1. A third-order n dimensional real tensor is called a piezoelectric tensor, if the later two indices of are symmetric, i.e., for all , where
In order to explore the properties of the piezoelectric effect, Chen et al. [
8] introduced the following
C-eigenpair.
Definition 2. For piezoelectric tensor , if there exists a scalar and vectors such thatwhere and with the i-th and the k-th entriesthen λ is called a C-eigenvalue of x and y are called associated left and right C-eigenvectors, respectively. For simplicity, is called a C-eigenpair of To investigate the existence and properties of
C-eigenpairs of a piezoelectric-type tensor, we recall the following theorem established in [
8].
Lemma 1. [Theorem 2.3 of [8]] Let be a piezoelectric-type tensor. Then, - (i)
There exist C-eigenvalues of and associated left and right C-eigenvectors.
- (ii)
Suppose that and y are a C-eigenvalue and its associated left and right C-eigenvectors of , respectively. Then Further, , and are also C-eigenpairs of tensor .
- (iii)
Denote the largest C-eigenvalue of and its associated left and right C-eigenvectors as respectively. Then
Further, forms the best rank-one piezoelectric-type approximation of
As we know, the largest
C-eigenvalue of a piezoelectric tensor has concrete physical meaning which determines the highest piezoelectric coupling constant [
1]. In view of the significance of the largest
C-eigenvalue, effective algorithms have been implemented [
9,
10,
11]. As pointed out by Chen et al. [
8], the number of
C-eigenvalues is equal to
when a piezoelectric tensor has finitely many equivalence classes of
C-eigenvalues; it is very costly to compute the largest
C-eigenvalue or all
C-eigenvalues for a high-dimensional piezoelectric tensor. Thus, some researchers turned to giving an interval to locate all
C-eigenvalues of piezoelectric tensors. Li et al. [
12] first gave
C-eigenvalue inclusion intervals to locate the
C-eigenvalues of piezoelectric tensors via the
S-partition method. Improved results can be found in [
13,
14,
15,
16]. As a special type of third-order tensor, piezoelectric tensors have unique properties on
C-eigenvectors. For instance, for the right
C-eigenvector
y, the fact that
holds. Therefore, if we perform an in-depth characterization of
C-eigenvectors and the structure of a piezoelectric tensor, we shall establish sharp
C-eigenvalue inclusion intervals. This constitutes the first motivation of the paper.
It is well known that the best rank-one approximation of a tensor has numerous applications in higher-order statistical data analysis [
17,
18,
19,
20]. For piezoelectric tensor
its best rank-one approximation is to find a scalar
and vectors
which minimize the following optimization problem:
where
and “∘” means the outer product and
is a rank-one tensor [
6,
8]. Further, Chen et al. [
8] showed that the largest
C-eigenvalue
and its
C-eigenvectors
form the best rank-one piezoelectric-type approximation of
i.e.,
Thus, we obtain the quotient of the residual of a symmetric best rank-one approximation of piezoelectric tensor
as follows:
which can be used to evaluate the efficiency of the best rank-one approximation. When we extract tensor information with the best rank-one approximation, a natural problem is how to quickly evaluate the efficiency of information extraction. Obviously, the smaller
is, the greater the efficiency of the best rank-one approximation. Therefore, we want to estimate the upper and lower bounds of the largest
C-eigenvalue to evaluate the efficiency of the best rank-one approximation of piezoelectric tensors, which represents the second motivation of the paper.
The remainder of the paper is organized as follows. In
Section 2, we first recall some fundamental existing results. By virtue of components of the left and right
C-eigenvector, we establish new
C-eigenvalue inclusion intervals of piezoelectric tensors, and show that these
C-eigenvalue intervals are sharper than some existing
C-eigenvalue intervals. In
Section 3, we use bound estimations of the largest
C-eigenvalue to evaluate the efficiency of the best rank-one approximation of piezoelectric tensors. The validity of the obtained results is tested by some examples.
2. C-eigenvalue Inclusion Intervals for Piezoelectric Tensors
In this section, we shall establish some sharp
C-eigenvalue inclusion intervals based on the exploration of its eigenvectors, and show that these
C-eigenvalue inclusion intervals improve some existing results [
12,
13,
14,
16]. To proceed, we recall the
C-eigenvalue inclusion intervals established by [
12].
Lemma 2. For piezoelectric tensor and its C-eigenvalue λ, it holds that where and
From Theorem 2.3 of [
8], we deduce that
is a
C-eigenvalue if
is a
C-eigenvalue. Hence, the
C-eigenvalue inclusion interval is symmetric about the origin. Before proceeding further, we need to establish the following lemma on the
C-eigenvector.
Lemma 3. For unit vector it holds that
Proof. For all
, it follows from
that
which implies
□
Theorem 1. Let λ be a C-eigenvalue of piezoelectric tensor . Then,where and Proof. Let
be a
C-eigenpair of the piezoelectric tensor
. Set
and
. Since
and
then
and
. By the
p-th equation of
in (
1), we have
By the definitions of
and Lemma 3, we obtain
which shows
On the other hand, the
q-th equation of
in (
1) yields
Since
and
, we have
which implies
Multiplying (
4) with (
5) yields
Further,
□
Now, we give a theoretical comparison between Theorem 1 and Theorem 1 of [
12].
Remark 1. Noting thatwe deduce thatHence,Thus, the interval in Theorem 1 captures all C-eigenvalues of piezoelectric tensors more precisely than the interval given in [12]. It is well known that
C-eigenvalues are invariant under orthogonal transformations, i.e., for
C-eigenpair
of piezoelectric tensor
and orthogonal matrix
Q,
is also a piezoelectric tensor [
8,
12], and
is also a
C-eigenvalue of tensor
, where
Hence, Li et al. [
12] derived the following new
C-eigenvalue interval for a piezoelectric tensor:
where
and
denotes the orthogonal matrix sets. However, the interval
given in Theorem 1 may not be invariant under orthogonal transformation, as shown below. Consider the piezoelectric tensor
in [
8,
21] with its nonzero entries
For orthogonal matrix
we have
Further, taking 150 orthogonal matrices
Q generated by the MATLAB code
we could obtain various values of
and
for
and
; see
Figure 1.
Obviously, there are some orthogonal matrices Q such that in Theorem 1 becomes smaller. From the arbitrariness of orthogonal matrix Q, for C-eigenvalue of piezoelectric tensor it holds that
Corollary 1. Let be the largest C-eigenvalue of piezoelectric tensor . Then, where
By and Cauchy–Schwartz inequality, we are in the position to establish the following theorems.
Theorem 2. Let λ be a C-eigenvalue of piezoelectric tensor . Thenwhere and Proof. Let
be a
C-eigenpair of the piezoelectric tensor
. Setting
and
, we obtain
and
By the
p-th equation of
in (
1), we have
and
where the third inequality uses Cauchy–Schwartz inequality and the second equality follows from
.
On the other hand, recalling the
q-th equation of
in (
1), one has
Since
and
, we have
where the third inequality uses the Cauchy–Schwartz inequality and the equality follows from
Multiplying (
6) with (
7) yields
and
By the definitions of
and
we obtain
□
Now, we make another theoretical comparison of the upper bounds given in Theorem 2 and Theorem 1 in [
12].
Remark 2. It is easy to verify thatHence, Thus, the interval captures all C-eigenvalues of piezoelectric tensors more precisely than the interval given in [12]. Similarly, the interval
given in Theorem 2 may not be invariant under orthogonal transformation. Following the generation process of the orthogonal matrix of Corollary 2, we obtain various values of
and
in [
12] and
and
for
and
; see
Figure 2.
Corollary 2. Let be the largest C-eigenvalue of piezoelectric tensor . Thenwhere In the following, we propose a sharp C-eigenvalue inclusion interval based on the symmetry of piezoelectric tensors.
Theorem 3. Let λ be a C-eigenvalue of piezoelectric tensor . Thenwhere Proof. It follows from (ii) of Lemma 1 that
For
C-eigenvalue
, using Cauchy inequality, we obtain
where
Further,
where
is a symmetric matrix. Then, it follows from Girshgorin circles for the matrices
that
which implies
□
It should be noted that interval
given in Theorem 3 may not be invariant under orthogonal transformation. In fact, following the generation process of the orthogonal matrix of Corollary 1, we can obtain various values of
and
in [
12] and
and
for
and
; see
Figure 3.
Corollary 3. Let be the largest C-eigenvalue of piezoelectric tensor . Thenwhere Now, we utilize numerical examples given in [
2,
3,
8,
21] to show the superiority of the obtained results.
Example. 1. (I) Take piezoelectric tensor with its nonzero entries (II) Take piezoelectric tensor with its nonzero entries (III) Take piezoelectric tensor with its nonzero entries (IV) Take piezoelectric tensor with its nonzero entries (V) Take piezoelectric tensor with its nonzero entries (VI) Take piezoelectric tensor with its nonzero entries (VII) Take piezoelectric tensor in the above; also see [8,21]. (VIII) Take piezoelectric tensor with its nonzero entries We locate all
C-eigenvalues of the above eight piezoelectric tensors by different methods. Since each interval mentioned above is symmetric about the origin, we only list the right boundary of each interval. Numerical results are shown in
Table 1.
In
Table 1,
represents the largest
C-eigenvalue of a piezoelectric tensor;
and
are the right boundaries of the intervals
and
obtained by Theorems 1 and 2 of [
12];
is the right boundary of the interval
obtained by Theorem 2.1 of [
15];
and
are the right boundaries of the intervals
and
obtained by Theorems 2.1, 2.2 and 2.4 of [
13];
is the right boundary of the interval
obtained by Theorem 2.1 of [
16];
is the right boundary of the interval
obtained by Theorem 5 of [
14];
and
are the right boundaries of the intervals
and
obtained by Theorems 1–3. Numerical results reveal that our results are sharper than those of [
12,
13,
14,
15,
16]
Table 1.
3. Efficiency Evaluation of the Best Rank-One Approximation of Piezoelectric Tensors
In this section, we will propose sharp bound estimations of the largest
C-eigenvalue, and evaluate the efficiency of the best rank-one approximation of piezoelectric tensors based on the quotient of the residual
in [
22,
23,
24]. First, we give a lower bound of the largest
C-eigenvalue for the piezoelectric tensor
.
Theorem 4. Let be the largest C-eigenvalue of piezoelectric tensor . Then, Proof. It follows from (iii) of Lemma 1 that
Next, we break down the proof into two cases to show
Case I.
Set
By (
9), it holds that
Case II.
Set
It follows from (
9) that
Summing up the above two cases, one has
In order to prove
, we set
or
Following similar arguments to the proof of Cases I and II, we obtain
It follows from (
11) and (
12) that
□
In what follows, we propose lower bounds of the largest
C-eigenvalue of the eight piezoelectric tensors in Example 1. Numerical results are shown in
Table 2, where
represents the lower bound of the largest
C-eigenvalue for a piezoelectric tensor.
In the following, we propose bound estimations for the quotient of the residual , which evaluate the efficiency of the best rank-one approximation for piezoelectric tensors.
Theorem 5. For piezoelectric tensor , it holds thatwhere and κ are defined in Theorems 1–4. Proof. Since
is a piezoelectric tensor, from Lemma 2, we deduce that
is a best rank-one approximation of
, i.e.,
where
is the largest
C-eigenvalue. From Theorems 1–4, we obtain that the quotient of the residual of piezoelectric tensor
is
□
In the following, we will calculate the quotient of the residual
of the eight piezoelectric tensors in Example 1. For the first piezoelectric tensor
we know
from
Table 1 and
Table 2, where
represents the largest
C-eigenvalue. Thus, we compute
which evaluates the efficiency of the best rank-one approximation for piezoelectric tensor
The quotients of the residual
of the other seven piezoelectric tensors in Example 1 are listed in
Table 3.