Component-wise accurate fixed point iterations for computing the square root of a singular M-matrix

Abstract

We analyze two fixed-point iterations for computing the principal square root of an M-matrix $A$. Although these iterations, with customary initialization, converge sublinearly when $A$ is a singular M-matrix, we show that, under suitable mild conditions on the initial approximation, the convergence is linear. Moreover, we provide component-wise accurate versions of these iterations, which allow us to approximate the principal square root with a component-wise relative error uniformly bounded by a small multiple of the machine precision. Numerical experiments demonstrating the effectiveness of the proposed algorithms for certain classes of problems are presented.