Two absolutely bounded determinantal ratios

Abstract

Bounded ratios of products of minors of positive definite matrices have a long history, starting with Hadamard's inequality in 1893. It states that for every positive semidefinite matrix $A$ $$ \det A \le A_{11} \cdots A_{nn}. $$ This inequality was subsequently generalized by Fisher and then further by Koteljanskii. The latter states that for every positive semidefinite matrix $A$ and any index sets $\alpha_1, \alpha_2 \subseteq \{1,\ldots, n\}$ one has $$ \det A[\alpha_1 \cup \alpha_2] \det A[\alpha_1 \cap \alpha_2] \le \det A[\alpha_1] \det A[\alpha_2], $$ where $A[\alpha]$ denotes the principal submatrix determined by the indexes in $\alpha$. In a manuscript published only on the arXiv in 2008, Hall and Johnson made three conjectures about ratios of products of principal minors of $4\times4$ positive definite matrices, denoted by $R_i$, $i=1,2,3$, see (2) and (3). They hypothesized that the supremum of $R_1$ was $27/16$, while the supremum of the other two ratios was $1$. Such ratios are called absolutely bounded. The conjecture for $R_1$ was affirmed in [17] and it is the only known bounded determinantal ratio with supremum bigger than one. The goal of this paper is to affirm the conjecture for $R_2$ and $R_3$. It is known that the upper bound for the ratios $R_i$, $i=1,2,3$, does not follow from repeated applications of Koteljanskii's inequality. In addition, Hall and Johnson showed that $R_i$ is bounded above by $4$, for $i=1,2,3$.