Alexandrov's inequality and conjectures on some Toeplitz matrices (Q869926)

Let \(n\) and \(N\) be fixed positive integers, and let \(Q\) be the \(n\times (n+N-1)\) zero-one Toeplitz matrix with \(Q_{ij}=1\) for \(0\leq j-i\leq N-1\) and \(Q_{ij}=0\) otherwise. The author shows that \(\det(QQ^{*})\) is the minimum of \(\det(RR^{*})\) over all complex matrices \(R\) with the same dimensions as \(Q\) satisfying \(\left| R_{ij}\right| \geq 1\) whenever \(Q_{ij}=1\) and \(R_{ij}=0\) otherwise. The proof involves Alexandrov's inequality for polarized determinants and its generalizations. Polarized Bazin-Reiss-Picquet identities, some connections with \(k\)-tree enumeration, and analogous conjectured inequalities for the elementary symmetric functions of \(QQ^{*}\) are also discussed.