An interlacing theorem for tridiagonal matrices (Q757528)

Let A be an \(n\times n\) matrix and A(S) denote the principal submatrix of A formed by rows and columns in \(S\subseteq \{1,...,n\}\). If A and B are \(n\times n\) matrices, then define \(\eta (A,B)=\sum_{S}\det A(S)\det B(S')\), where S ranges over all subsets of \(\{\) 1,...,n\(\}\) and \(S'\) is the complement of S. It has been conjectured that if A is positive definite and B Hermitian, then the polynomial \(\eta\) (\(\lambda\) A,-B) has only real roots. The main contribution of this paper is to establish this conjecture when both A and B are tridiagonal.