Normal nonnegative realization of spectra

The nonnegative inverse eigenvalue problem is the problem of finding necessary and sufficient conditions for the existence of an entrywise nonnegative matrix A with prescribed spectrum. This problem remains open for . If the matrix A is required to be normal, the problem will be called the normal nonnegative inverse eigenvalue problem (NNIEP). Sufficient conditions for a list of complex numbers to be the spectrum of a normal nonnegative matrix were obtained by Xu [Linear Multilinear Algebra. 1993;34:353–364]. In this paper, we give a normal version of a rank-r perturbation result due to Rado and published by Perfect [Duke Math. J. 1955;22:305–311], which allow us to obtain new sufficient conditions for the NNIEP to have a solution. These new conditions significantly improve Xu’s conditions. We also apply our results to construct nonnegative matrices with arbitrarily prescribed elementary divisors.