Applications of stable polynomials to mixed determinants: Johnson's conjectures, unimodality, and symmetrized Fischer products (Q930133)

For any \(n\times n\) matrix \(A\) and any subset \(\mathcal{S\subseteq}\{ 1,2,\dots ,n\} \) let \(A[\mathcal{S]}\) denote the principal submatrix of \(A\) with rows and columns indexed by \(\mathcal{S}\). For any two \(n\times n\) complex matrices \(A\) and \(B\) we define \(\eta(A,B):=\) \(\sum\det A[\mathcal{S} ]\det B[\mathcal{S}^{\prime}]\) where the sum is over all subsets \(\mathcal{S}\) of \(\{ 1,2,\dots ,n\}\) and \(\mathcal{S}^{\prime}\) denotes the complement of \(\mathcal{S}\). The main result of this paper is a proof of the following theorem. Let \(B\) be Hermitian and \(A\) be nonnegative definite. Then: (1) all roots of the polynomial \(\eta(zA,-B)\) are real; (2) if \(A>0\) then this polynomial has as many positive, negative and zero roots as suggested by the inertia of \(B\); and (3) for each \(i\) the roots of \(\eta(zA[\{ i\} ^{\prime}],-B[\{ i\} ^{\prime}])\) interlace the roots of \(\eta(zA,-B).\) These results were conjectured by \textit{C. R. Johnson} in [``The permanent-on-top conjecture: a status report'', Current trends in matrix theory, Proc. 3rd Conf., Auburn/Ala. 1986, 167--174 (1987; Zbl 0671.15007) and Linear Multilinear Algebra 25, 289--290 (1989)], but until now only special cases were proved. The authors actually obtain more general results than these, and their methods allow them to obtain results on \(s\)-tuples of matrix pencils and real stable polynomials. For example, they obtain the following version of the Koteljanskii inequality. Suppose that \(\mathcal{S}\) and \(\mathcal{T}\) are subsets \(\left\{ 1,2,\dots ,n\right\} \) of the same size which differ by only one element. Then for any Hermitian \(n\times n\) matrix \(A\), we have \(\det A[\mathcal{S\cup T}]\det A[\mathcal{S\cap T}]\leq\det A[\mathcal{S}]\det A[\mathcal{T}]\).