On D. Hägele’s approach to the Bessis-Moussa-Villani conjecture

The reformulation of the Bessis-Moussa-Villani (BMV) conjecture given by Lieb and Seiringer asserts that the coefficient α_m,k(A,B) of t^k in the polynomial Tr(A+tB)^m, with A,B positive semidefinite matrices, is nonnegative for all m,k. We propose a natural extension of a method of attack on this problem due to Hägele, and investigate for what values of m,k the method is successful, obtaining a complete determination when either m or k is odd.