Positive semi-definiteness of generalized anti-circulant tensors

Anti-circulant tensors have applications in exponential data fitting. They are special Hankel tensors. In this paper, we extend the definition of anti-circulant tensors to generalized anticirculant tensors by introducing a circulant index r such that the entries of the generating vector of a Hankel tensor are circulant with module r. In the special case when r=n, where n is the dimension of the Hankel tensor, the generalized anti-circulant tensor reduces to the anti-circulant tensor. Hence, generalized anti-circulant tensors are still special Hankel tensors. For the cases that GCD(m,r)=1, GCD(m,r)=2, and some other cases, including the matrix case that m=2, we give necessary and sufficient conditions for positive semi-definiteness of even-order generalized anti-circulant tensors and show that, in these cases, they are sum-of-squares tensors. This shows that, in these cases, there are no PNS (positive semi-definite tensors which are not sum-of-squares) Hankel tensors.