Los Alamos National Laboratory, Los Alamos, NM 87545, USA
Abstract:
We prove that the mixed discriminant of doubly stochastic n-tuples of semidefinite hermitian n×n matrices is bounded below by and that this bound is uniquely attained at the n-tuple . This result settles a conjecture posed by R. Bapat in 1989. We consider various generalizations and applications of this result.