Permanent Versus Determinant over a Finite Field

Let $ \mathbb{F} $ be a finite field of characteristic different from 2. We study the cardinality of sets of matrices with a given determinant or a given permanent for the set of Hermitian matrices $ {{\mathcal{H}}_n}\left( \mathbb{F} \right) $ and for the whole matrix space M _n ( $ \mathbb{F} $ ). It is known that for n = 2, there are bijective linear maps Φ on $ {{\mathcal{H}}_n}\left( \mathbb{F} \right) $ and M _n ( $ \mathbb{F} $ ) satisfying the condition per A = det Φ(A). As an application of the obtained results, we show that if n ≥ 3, then the situation is completely different and already for n = 3, there is no pair of maps (Φ, ?), where Φ is an arbitrary bijective map on matrices and ? : $ \mathbb{F} $ → $ \mathbb{F} $ is an arbitrary map such that per A = ?(det Φ(A)) for all matrices A from the spaces $ {{\mathcal{H}}_n}\left( \mathbb{F} \right) $ and M _n ( $ \mathbb{F} $ ), respectively. Moreover, for the space M _n ( $ \mathbb{F} $ ), we show that such a pair of transformations does not exist also for an arbitrary n > 3 if the field $ \mathbb{F} $ contains sufficiently many elements (depending on n). Our results are illustrated by a number of examples.