A New Impossibility Region for the $5\times5$ Symmetric Nonnegative Inverse Eigenvalue Problem

Abstract: We present a new impossibility region for the $5\times5$ symmetric nonnegative inverse eigenvalue problem. The region lies in the low-trace regime and, to the best of our knowledge, has not been identified previously. The proof uses a suitable diagonal shift to transform the problem to a critical high-trace boundary and then reduces a complementary commuting matrix to a weighted five-cycle. The characteristic polynomial and spectral identities of this five-cycle provide the main tools for deriving the resulting contradiction.