The outer product of column vectors and
over a field
is the
matrix
Thus its th
entry is
.
Over the complex numbers, some authors use the
conjugate transpose
instead, especially when the outer product is associated
with an inner product.
An outer-product matrix has matrix rank at most 1, and has matrix rank 1 when both
vectors are nonzero. The outer product is the matrix representation
of the tensor product after bases have been chosen.