Hamiltonian square roots of skew-Hamiltonian matrices Original Research Article

We present a constructive existence proof that every real skew-Hamiltonian matrix W has a real Hamiltonian square root. The key step in this construction shows how one may bring any such W into a real quasi-Jordan canonical form via symplectic similarity. We show further that every W has infinitely many real Hamiltonian square roots, and give a lower bound on the dimension of the set of all such square roots. Some extensions to complex matrices are also presented.