The weak core inverse

In this paper, we introduce a new generalized inverse, called weak core inverse (or, in short, WC inverse) of a complex square matrix. This new inverse extends the notion of the core inverse defined by Baksalary and Trenkler (Linear Multilinear Algebra 58(6):681–697, 2010). We investigate characterizations, representations, and properties for this generalized inverse. In addition, we introduce weak core matrices (or, in short, WC matrices) and we show that these matrices form a more general class than that given by the known weak group matrices, recently investigated by H. Wang and X. Liu.