Advances on the Bessis-Moussa-Villani trace conjecture (Q996225)

Let \(A\) and \(B\) be \(n\times n\) complex positive semidefinite matrices and for scalar \(t\) and integer \(m>0\) write \((A+tB)^{m}=\sum_{k=0}^{m}S_{m,k} (A,B)t^{k}\). Recently \textit{E. H. Lieb} and \textit{T. Seiringer} [J. Stat Phys. 115, 185--190 (2004; Zbl 1157.81313)] showed that a long-standing conjecture of \textit{D. Bessis, P. Moussa} and \textit{M. Villani} [J. Math. Phys. 16, 2318--2325 (1975; Zbl 0976.82501)] is equivalent to the conjecture (BMV): the trace polynomial \(p(t):=\text{Tr}[(A+tB)^{m}]\) has nonnegative coefficients for all \(m\) (it is not hard to show that the coefficients of \(p(t)\) are real). Let \(\mathcal{U}\) be the set of all \(n\times n\) positive semidefinite matrices with Frobenius norm \(1\). Suppose that, for given \(m>k>0\), the maximum (respectively, minimum) over \(\mathcal{U}\) of the coefficient \(\text{Tr}[S_{m,k}(A,B)]\) is attained at \((A,B).\) Then the present author proves that two ``Euler-Lagrange equations'' hold, namely, \[ \begin{aligned} AS_{m-1,k}(A,B)&=A^{2}\text{Tr}[AS_{m-1,k}(A,B)]\\ \text{and} BS_{m-1,k-1}(A,B)&=B^{2}\text{Tr}[BS_{m-1,k-1}(A,B)].\end{aligned} \] A number of consequences follow. For example, (Corollary 1.8) if the BMV conjecture holds for some value \(m_{0}\) of \(m\) then it is true for all smaller values; and, (Theorem 1.10) for fixed \(m\) and \(k\), the coefficient \(\text{Tr}[S_{m,k}(A,B)]\) of \(p(t)\) is nonnegative for all positive semidefinite \(A\) and \(B\) if and only if \(S_{m,k}(A,B)\) has at least one positive eigenvalue whenever \(S_{m,k}(A,B)\neq0\). The author also makes several conjectures including the following (which implies BMV): if two Hermitian matrices \(A\) and \(B\) satisfy the Euler-Lagrange equations for some \(m>k>0\), then \(AB=BA\).