On a conjecture concerning totally extremal ideal Perron similarities

Abstract: Identifying ideal Perron similarities is a problem of central interest in the longstanding nonnegative inverse eigenvalue problem (NIEP). A normalized ideal Perron similarity is called totally extremal if every entry has modulus one. Recently, Gershnik et al. [J. Algebra 694 (2026), 782--800] proved that the character table of a finite Abelian group is totally extremal and conjectured the converse. In this paper, we settle this conjecture in the affirmative by first showing that the rows of a totally extremal normalized ideal Perron similarity form a group under the Hadamard product. Then, it is shown that the rows of a nonsingular matrix form a group under the Hadamard product if and only if it is the character table of a finite Abelian group, and we further show that this group is isomorphic to the underlying group. These results extend the classical theorem due to Romanovsky and Karpelevič on the unimodular eigenvalues of stochastic matrices in the complex unit disk to the setting of spectratopes in the unit ball of complex Euclidean space.