On circulant and skew-circulant splitting algorithms for (continuous) Sylvester equations

Abstract: We present a circulant and skew-circulant splitting (CSCS) iterative method for solving large sparse continuous Sylvester equations $AX + XB = C$, where the coefficient matrices $A$ and $B$ are Toeplitz matrices. A theoretical study shows that if the circulant and skew-circulant splitting factors of $A$ and $B$ are positive semi-definite and at least one is positive definite (not necessarily Hermitian), then the CSCS method converges to the unique solution of the Sylvester equation. In addition, we obtain an upper bound for the convergence factor of the CSCS iteration. This convergence factor depends only on the eigenvalues of the circulant and skew-circulant splitting matrices. A computational comparison with alternative methods reveals the efficiency and reliability of the proposed method.