The minimal dimension of stable faces required to guarantee stability of a matrix polytope: D-stability

The problem of determining whether a polytope P of n ×n matrices is D-stable-i.e. whether each point in P has all its eigenvalues in a given nonempty, open, convex, conjugate-symmetric subset D of the complex plane-is discussed. An approach which checks the D-stability of certain faces of P is used. In particular, for each D and n the smallest integer m such that D-stability of every m-dimensional face guarantees D-stability of P is determined. It is shown that, without further information describing the particular structure of a polytope, either (2n-4)-dimensional or (2n-2)-dimensional faces need to be checked for D-stability, depending on the structure of D. Thus more work needs to be done before a computationally tractable algorithm for checking D-stability can be devised