A real orthogonal or complex unitary matrix (usually denoted Q) is often
represented in
LAPACK as a product of elementary reflectors -- also referred to as
elementary Householder matrices (usually denoted Hi). For example,
The following further details may occasionally be useful.
An elementary reflector (or elementary Householder matrix) H of order
n is a
unitary matrix of the form
There is some redundancy in the representation (5.1), which can be
removed in
various ways. The representation used in LAPACK (which differs from
those used in LINPACK or EISPACK) sets v1 = 1; hence v1 need not
be stored. In real arithmetic,
,
except that
implies H = I.
In complex arithmetic,
may be
complex, and satisfies
and
.
Thus a complex H is
not Hermitian (as it is in other representations), but it is unitary,
which is the important property. The advantage of allowing
to be
complex is that, given an arbitrary complex vector x, H can be computed
so that
For further details, see Lehoucq [79].