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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 October 2020
We introduce the notion of the slot length of a family of matrices over an arbitrary field ${\mathbb {F}}$ . Using this definition it is shown that, if $n\ge 5$ and A and B are $n\times n$ complex matrices with A unicellular and the pair $\{A,B\}$ irreducible, the slot length s of $\{A,B\}$ satisfies $2\le s\le n-1$ , where both inequalities are sharp, for every n. It is conjectured that the slot length of any irreducible pair of $n\times n$ matrices, where $n\ge 5$ , is at most $n-1$ . The slot length of a family of rank-one complex matrices can be equal to n.