An Improvement of an Inequality of Fiedler Leading to a New Conjecture on Nonnegative Matrices

Suppose that A is an n × n nonnegative matrix whose eigenvalues are = (A), ₂, ..., _n. Fiedler and others have shown that \det( I -A) ⁿ - ⁿ, for all > with equality for any such if and only if A is the simple cycle matrix. Let a _i be the signed sum of the determinants of the principal submatrices of A of order i × i, i=1, ..., n - 1. We use similar techniques to Fiedler to show that Fiedler's inequality can be strengthened to: for all . We use this inequality to derive the inequality that: . In the spirit of a celebrated conjecture due to Boyle-Handelman, this inequality inspires us to conjecture the following inequality on the nonzero eigenvalues of A: If ₁ = (A), ₂,...,_k are (all) the nonzero eigenvalues of A, then . We prove this conjecture for the case when the spectrum of A is real.