Polynomials that preserve nonnegative matrices (Q2070842)

In this paper, a matrix \(A\) is nonnegative (written \(A\geq 0\)) if the entries of \(A\) are real and nonnegative. The authors define \(\mathcal{P}_{n}\) to be the set of polynomials \(p(x)\in \mathbb{R}[x]\) such that \(p(A)\geq 0\) for each \(n\times n\) matrix \(A\geq 0\). The Pólya-Szegö theorem shows that \(p(x)\in \mathcal{P}_{1}\) if and only if \(p=\left( f_{1}^{2}+f_{2}^{2}\right) +x\left( g_{1}^{2}+g_{2}^{2}\right) \) for some \( f_{1},f_{2},g_{1},g_{2}\in \mathbb{R}[x]\). Only incomplete results are known for \(n>1\). Trivially a polynomial with nonnegative coefficients lies in every \(\mathcal{P}_{n}\) and it is easily seen that \(\mathcal{P} _{n+1}\subseteq \mathcal{P}_{n}\) for all \(n.\) The authors show that for each \(n\) every \(p\in \mathcal{P}_{n}\) of degree \(<2n\) has all coefficients nonnegative. On the other hand, they conjecture that for all \(n\) we have \( \mathcal{P}_{n+1}\neq \mathcal{P}_{n}\), but this has only been verified for \( n=1\) and \(2\).