Unimodularity of zeros of self-inversive polynomials

Abstract

We generalise a necessary and sufficient condition given by Cohn for all the zeros of a self-inversive polynomial to be on the unit circle. Our theorem implies some sufficient conditions found by Lakatos, Losonczi and Schinzel. We apply our result to the study of a polynomial family closely related to Ramanujan polynomials, recently introduced by Gun, Murty and Rath, and studied by Murty, Smyth and Wang and Lal\'in and Rogers. We prove that all polynomials in this family have their zeros on the unit circle, a result conjectured by Lal\'in and Rogers on computational evidence.