Circulant matrices: norm, powers, and positivity

In their recent paper "The spectral norm of a Horadam circulant matrix", Merikoski, Haukkanen, Mattila and Tossavainen study under which conditions the spectral norm of a general real circulant matrix ${\bf C}$ equals the modulus of its row/column sum. We improve on their sufficient condition until we have a necessary one. Our results connect the above problem to positivity of sufficiently high powers of the matrix ${\bf C^\top C}$. We then generalize the result to complex circulant matrices.