This paper is concerned with the zero-norm regularized quadratic optimization with a sphere constraint, which has an important application in sparse eigenvalue problems. For this class of nonconvex and nonsmooth optimization problems, we establish the KL property of exponent 1/2 for its extended-valued objective function and develop a globally and linearly convergent proximal gradient method (PGM). Numerical experiments are included for sparse principal component analysis (PCA) with synthetic and real data to confirm the obtained theoretic results.