Linear pencils and quadratic programming problems with a quadratic constraint

Given bounded selfadjoint operators $A$ and $B$ acting on a Hilbert space $\mathcal{H}$, consider the linear pencil $P(\lambda)=A+\lambda B$, $\lambda\in\mathbb{R}$. The set of parameters $\lambda$ such that $P(\lambda)$ is a positive (semi)definite operator is characterized. These results are applied to solving a quadratic programming problem with an equality quadratic constraint (or a QP1EQC problem).